Everything happens when it is supposed to happen. When the world received the Strokes in the fledgling moments of the new millennium, we were collectively coping with how to be a functional (read: non-extinct) society in a world we were months earlier expecting to implode because of Y2K and the inevitable reign-of-terror wrought by shitty desktops.

Julian Casablancas and the rest of the Strokes gave us a temporary vacuum. In a chaotic, hostile environment, the Strokes gave us neat, mapped out, clinically precise rock songs that alluded nostalgically to a familiar rock n’ roll idiom. Sure, there were sharp angles and unusual croaks, but never any distractions. It was a sound we needed to combat all external distortion.

With a single band-aid rip, Casablancas and his new band, The Voidz have embraced entropy and let all that rattling, discordant, and disquieting noise from the outside world inside the meticulously built machine he helped construct a decade ago. Stray laser beam reports and string sections all float contiguously in an antigravity chamber, and the result is really transfixing. If this 11-minute introductory track is an accurate litmus test, Julian Casablancas’ music, is, once again, a product of its own environment. And that, for better or for worse, is what we need, or at least deserve. Looking very forward to the rest of this album.