098 Steven Hyden on the Strokes

On this episode, Marc talks with Steven Hyden, author of "Is This It: The Never Ending Rise and Fall of The Strokes (And Rock ‘n’ Roll)," released in September of 2026. It's a look at the career and impact of this New York band who got huge waves of attention when their first album, Is This It, came out in 2001, and have since had a kind of up and down career both commercially and critically. Hyden's book is as much cultural analysis and criticism as it is biography, delving into the way rock and roll itself has changed over the last 25 years, and tackling some bigger philosophical questions about what all of this means. As Steven writes, "A quarter century after they were heralded as "the coolest band on the planet" by one especially overexcited British music magazine, the Strokes remain a Rorschach test. The aspirations and the biases of the behloder give shape to their otherwise uneven and amorphous body of work. Did the Strokes peak early and fail to live up to lofty expectations? Or did music culture change in such a profound way at the turn of the century that those expectations were already anachronistic by the time Is This It entered record stores?" We hope you enjoy Marc's chat with Steven Hyden!