Room on Fire by The Strokes

Room on Fire, the Strokes' second album, came out on RCA in October 2003, and the big question was whether five cool kids could do it twice. The answer is a wiry, jittery yes. Julian Casablancas still croons like he's too bored to raise his voice until suddenly he isn't, Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. still lace their guitars together like two halves of a zipper, and Nikolai Fraiture and Fabrizio Moretti keep the bottom end tight enough to bounce a quarter off.

What's new is the sharpened focus. The songs are shorter on swagger and longer on hooks, and there are some odd new colors in the garage: "12:51" makes a guitar squeal like a vintage synth, "Reptilia", which gave the album its title through one of its lines, is a coiled, frantic sprint, and "The End Has No End" slinks along with a lazy, loping cool. All 3 went out as singles.

Critics liked it, and so did the buyers. It reached number four on the Billboard 200, sold 597,000 copies in the US by October 2006 for a gold certification from the RIAA, and went all the way to number two in the UK.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.