These songs couldn't be concise pop gems musically and emotionally, they're too complicated. "The Adults Are Talking" isn't just wittily named, the way its vocals and guitars swell and soar reflects how the band has updated their time-tested sound - taut rhythms, intertwining melodies - and rewritten the rules that don't work anymore. Bitterness is inescapable even on the hazy synth jam "Eternal Summer," where he mutters, "Everybody's on the take." But on these lengthy, brooding songs about leaving and being left behind, the Strokes sound more engaged and united than they have in years.
On "Bad Decisions," a quintessential example of the Strokes' knowing hedonism that melts some Modern English into its tumbling beats and guitars, Julian Casablancas' jubilance comes from shedding a relationship that was going nowhere. Fair warning: the band's sixth album is short on the rockers for which they're famous. On Room on Fire, that moment was "The End Has No End" on First Impressions of Earth, it was "Ize of the World." For the first time in their career, on The New Abnormal they stay in that emotional space for more than just a song or two, and the results are some of their most rewarding music. Though the Strokes have cultivated a cooler-than-cool reputation over the years, at least once on every album they reveal the melancholy underneath the facade.