The Strokes are an American rock band formed in 1998 in New York City. The Strokes consist of vocalist Julian Casablancas, guitarists Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr., bassist Nicholas Freichur, and drummer Fabrizio Moretti.
All of the band members were associated in one way or another with vocalist and songwriter Julian Casablancas.
We can say that the band’s genesis began within the walls of the Dwight Private School, which has educated the children of prosperous New Yorkers since 1980. The Strokes themselves call “Dwight” simply – “A school for rich jerks.
Casablancas, Nick Valensi and Fabrizio Moretti met at Dwight in the mid-’90s and quickly bonded over a shared obsession with music. The three were united by a natural rebellious spirit that separated them from the school crowd. Unlike most of their classmates, whom they described as a bunch of nerds and five minutes fans of Eminem, the friends had little attraction to gangsta rap. On the contrary, the guys listened to alternative bands of that time – Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and a lot of other music: from New York punk bands of the 70s to Bob Marley. The Velvet Underground was particularly influential in shaping their musical taste.
Nick Valensi described the situation at the time, “I don’t know if we were outcasts, but there was definitely a group of ‘cool’ kids at school and we weren’t one of them.”
The trio learned to play together; Valensi devoted himself to the guitar, which he first picked up at age 5; Moretti honed his drumming skills in a soundproof bathroom in his mother’s apartment.
Even before he met Valensi and Moretti, Casablancas had left to study at the Le Rossi Institute in Switzerland because he had behavioral problems and an addiction to alcohol in his youth, which caused Julian to do poorly at school.
At Le Rossi, Casablancas met Albert Hammond Jr., most likely because they were both Americans. They were not particularly close friends because Hammond was two years younger than Casablancas. After six months of studying in Switzerland, Julian returned back to America.
In 1998 Casablancas met Hammond again in New York and offered him to join the band, which at that moment already included Nick Valensi and Fabrizio Moretti, as well as the bassist Nikolai Freichur, with whom Julian had been a friend since the age of six. In the same year, after changing several names (such as De Niros, The Motels) the band got its final name “The Strokes”.
In fact, The Strokes’ meteoric success is the result of at least three years of hard work. One can understand why the musicians pay particular attention in the press to how much effort and time they devoted to their first album: The Strokes spent countless late-night hours reworking and improving musical material in a smelly and shabby rehearsal room they rented in Manhattan for $300 a month.