“Last Nite” by The Strokes

"Last Nite" first surfaced on the Strokes' The Modern Age EP early in 2001, then returned that October as the follow-up single to "Hard to Explain" on Is This It, the band's first full-length. Julian Casablancas wrote it top to bottom, and he sings it through a haze, like a guy slumped against the bar at closing time who can't be bothered to raise his voice until he absolutely has to.

Behind him the band locks into a tight garage-rock strut. Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. chop out clean, clipped guitar parts that answer each other like two friends finishing each other's sentences, Nikolai Fraiture's bass bounces along underneath, and Fabrizio Moretti keeps the beat as steady as a metronome. Gordon Raphael produced it and kept it lean and a little fuzzy around the edges, as if nobody had bothered to scrub the demo, which is exactly the point: this is a rock band that sounds like it just wandered in off the street.

RCA followed it with "Someday", and across the Atlantic it cracked the top 20 in the UK.

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