With Strokes

The New Abnormal is the long awaited new album from The Strokes, and the band’s first album in seven years. The album was announced with the first track and video, “At The Door.” The New Abnormal is The Strokes’ sixth studio album and was recorded at Shangri-La Studios in Malibu, California, with producer Rick Rubin. The album’s cover artwork is a painting called ‘Bird on Money,’ by famed artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. The Strokes are singer Julian Casablancas, guitarists Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr, bassist Nikolai Fraiture and drummer Fabrizio Moretti.

All of Billy Squier's best material is dished out on 16 Strokes, from the simplistic contagiousness of "The Stroke" to the Van Halen-like fervency of "Tied Up." His rock & roll flamboyancy, a mix of hard but not heavy guitar riffs wrapped around spirited just-for-fun three-minute outpourings, was best established through his singles and not the entirety of his albums. Squier's wild, sexually inundated feistiness is best represented here on a compilation, where the sleekness of "Everybody Wants You" is found in the same place as the naughty "She Goes Down." Both "In the Dark" and "My Kinda Lover" from 1981's Don't Say No pop up here, as does his smoothest of songs, "Emotions in Motion" from the album of the same name.