julian casablancas for creem magazine, december 2024 (x)
Feeling The Voidz
How to avoid a stroke? Interview Julian Casablancas.
By Taran Dugal
It is a horrifically humid September afternoon in Manhattan, the kind where the leaves falling from the trees seem more like suicide jumpers than a physical manifestation of the changing seasons. I find myself seated at a wooden table in the back corner of Lucien, an upscale French restaurant in the East Village that happens to be a frequent haunt of certain high-profile individuals including Bella Hadid, A$AP Rocky, and Julia Fox. The table is laid with a white silk tablecloth, upon which sits a small candle, its flame flickering desperately. Across from me, fidgeting with his coffee cup, is Julian Casablancas, frontman of the Strokes, a New York City band that was heralded as the saviors of rock ’n’ roll in the early aughts and widely credited with jump-starting a number of decade-defining cultural movements, among them the “post-punk revival” and the “indie sleaze aesthetic,” the latter of which centers on leather jackets, cigarettes, and skinny jeans, and which oh-so-many socialites would lead you to believe is experiencing a resurgence in certain low-lit corners of downtown Manhattan.
But we are not here to talk about downtown Manhattan, or cigarettes, or skinny jeans, or postpunk, or even the Strokes. Instead, our minds are on the Voidz—a band Julian formed in 2013 as a kind of Batman to his other project’s Bruce Wayne, one whose music has been described as “dystopian rock,” “Middle Eastern Cyber Prison Jazz,” and, perhaps most eloquently, “battery acid." In three days, the Voidz are set to release their third LP, Like All Before You. I am here to talk about the album with Julian, and I am on edge because precisely 39 minutes before we were scheduled to meet, I received a call from his publicist, who told me that he’d most definitely be in a bad mood. “A bit gruff” was how she put it. According to her, Julian had been subjected to an “awful interview” earlier that day, meaning that he’d fielded questions that only dealt with “the Strokes, the Strokes, the Strokes,” rather than the Voidz, or the new album, and he’d apparently hung up on the interviewer. “If he’s mean to you,” the publicist said, “try not to think too much of it—just roll with the punches.”
I do my best to keep this sublime advice in mind as we settle in. Julian is dressed sharply, if not eclectically—blue jeans, a black leather belt, and a navy button-down, all topped by a beige blazer with a bright orange handkerchief jutting out of its breast pocket. The button-down is emblazoned with a psychedelic pattern that resembles a series of interconnected, misshapen gingerbread men. Somehow, it actually looks cool, although Julian himself seems tired. He’s just made the drive down from Connecticut, where he now spends a significant amount of time. It is not a fun drive, and I can see his weariness dissolve as the steam from his coffee unfurls and makes its way toward his nostrils. He lifts the mug up to his face, blows on it a little, takes a big sip, and lets out a deep exhale. It strikes me that, other than me, Julian, and his manager, there are no other patrons inside the restaurant. It is quiet, save for the clattering of dishware and Edith Piaf’s searing soprano, which is lilting out of the loudspeaker just above us. The song is “La Vie en Rose.” Julian leans in toward me, and, recalling the publicist’s warning, I brace myself for a jab. Instead, a smile creeps across his face. “So what are you looking for?” he quips. “A relationship? Or just hookups?”
The joke sets me at ease. Despite the publicist’s fussing, it seems clear that Julian isn’t pissed off. That said, he isn’t exactly a Chatty Cathy, either. As we ease into things, his cards stay close to his chest. He is intensely self-aware, and the intensity of that scrutiny gives our conversation a distinct rhythm. Julian counters most of my questions with considered pauses, and when he does start to speak, his answers begin at a slow, halting cadence. Eventually, the engine warms up, and these musings turn into fast-paced, expansive rambles that go on for minutes at a time. When they do lose steam, it’s abrupt and decisive. Oftentimes, I find that I’ve forgotten what I asked him in the first place. This isn’t to say that Julian is a bad conversationalist. In fact, as things progress, it turns out that he’s a great chat—his long-winded answers contain everything from self-deprecating barbs to shrewd insights, and for good measure, he throws in a decent amount of obscure cultural references (from Nabokov’s Inuitation to a Beheading to Demolition Man, a mostly forgotten 1993 sci-fi film starring Sylvester Stallone).
I start by asking him about the band’s intentions for the new album. On Like All Before You, the Voidz (consisting of Casablancas, guitarists Jeramy “Beardo” Critter and Amir Yaghmai, bassist Jake Bercovici, drummer Alex Carapetis, and keyboardist Jeff Kite) cover a tremendous amount of ground in 10 tracks and 43 minutes. The album’s opening tune, “Overture,” features a gothic organ that flutters between nostalgia and despondence, and its follow-up, “Square Wave,” is a new-wave number whose chorus foregrounds an ocean of synths that drown Casablancas’ melancholic croon. Other standouts include “Spectral Analysis,” a shimmering composition that sounds like it was recorded in an alternate universe where Bill Evans had never been introduced to heroin and cocaine, and instead set his sights on avant-garde rock—Kite’s keyboard-playing here floats like the mist at the base of a waterfall. The album’s most radio-friendly song is “Flexorcist,” which contains lyrics straight out of a Kerouacian fever dream. The chorus, with its jaunty, headbanging guitars and Casablancas’ vaulting vocals, makes the track sound like it was unearthed from a time vault housing the soundtrack for 2075’s biggest summer blockbuster.
It’s evident that the album was decidedly not made to appeal to contemporary pop sensibilities. Most of the tracks are home to moments that deviate from typical musical norms, like the disjointed, cyclical riffs in “All the Same” and the sinister, pitched-down vocals in “When Will the Time of These Bastards End." Julian is well aware of this. In fact, that was a conscious decision. “I think, before this record, we were still kind of in that phase where we were trying to afford the tour.” This checks out. Virtue, the Voidz’s second album, is far from a conventional rock record, but it is certainly more straightforward than Like All Before You. “There was a moment where I think we all got on the same page,” Julian says of the new album. “We knew we could do something kind of traditional, and if that became popular, then cool, great, whatever. But if we did something alienfuture-weird, some kind of next-level unknown, and that became big, it would be so much more amazing on every level. We were all like, yes, let’s do that.”
It is an ambitious goal, but an unsurprising one nonetheless. After all, this is a band fronted by a man who, at the age of 22, asked the producer of his debut album to make his vocals sound “like your favorite blue jeans.” And yet, despite what the sonics of Like All Before You might lead you to believe, Julian maintains that he isn’t entirely pop-averse. “There’s an alternate universe of popular music,” he tells me. “I hate pop, but the pop on TikTok and Instagram or whatever can be cool. It’s kind of gothy, and there’s funk, and sometimes I don’t mind it. We mixed the chorus of ‘Square Wave’ on a phone to hear how it might sound if it came up on a video of cats, or some glorious soccer goal.” I tell Julian that he’s just provided CREEM and its readers some brilliant insight into his feed. “Yeah,” he smirks. “Cats and soccer.”
After a certain point, I decide to dig a little deeper. There is a certain chord progression used on the album that I’ve noticed in a few different Voidz songs. For those of you who (like me) have not bothered to spend anything more than a harrowing 15 minutes nose-deep in music theory, fret not: I’m talking about the soul-centering, melancholic sequence that takes center stage on tracks like “Human Sadness,” the first single from Tyranny, the Voidz’s debut LP. It’s a herculean, gut-wrenching song, one that spans 11 minutes and several emotional lifetimes. You might also recognize the progression from his work with the Strokes.
“Yeah,” says Julian, “it’s on a lot. ‘The Adults Are Talking’ and ‘Life Is Simple in the Moonlight.’ Even if you go back to, like, ‘Hard to Explain.”’ He pauses. “I don’t know if you know any of these songs.” The thought is laughable, if not humble—no self-respecting rocker hasn’t listened to Is This It at least a dozen times—but I decide not to mention this, and he continues. “It’s everywhere, like on Harry Styles’ ‘As It Was,’ and that one Dua Lipa song.” I ask Julian if he means “Levitating” (admittedly, the only Dua Lipa song that I know), and he asks if I can sing it. I swallow my pride and follow through. “Nah, not that one,” he says. “It’s more like—” and he sings out a phrase in his rich baritone. Here’s some advice: If you ever want to feel ashamed about your own vocal abilities, try going bar for bar with Julian Casablancas.
“I think it’s called ‘Cocaine’ or something,” he says. It’s not—turns out the song is called “We’re Good"—but to his credit, some of Dua’s lyrics are about cocaine. Julian takes the moment to offer a pithy Casablancas-ism: “Getting a boyfriend—bad career move for her. ” He chuckles and then takes it back. “That’s fucked up.” Finally, refocusing on my original question, he issues a decree: “We’re not going to do that progression anymore." Then, a pause. “Well, actually, that’s not true, because I’m working on this new thing.... But all I know is, going forward, that chord progression won’t be there. So enjoy it. Suckle on its sweet juice. Farewell.”
As if to bid the notion goodbye, he takes a swig of his coffee, and I use the moment to flip through the pocket-size notebook I’d brought with me to the restaurant, which is full of scribbled, mostly illegible questions that I haven’t yet considered asking. A woman from Lucien’s waitstaff notices a break in the action and comes up to our table, smile beaming and eyes sparkling. “So good to see you again!” she exclaims to Julian. He turns and responds with a mildly convincing “Yeah, you too.” It’s hard to tell if he actually recognizes her, but he puts in the requisite amount of effort to make it seem like he just might.
As we start talking again, I notice that Julian’s reticence, which so dominated the first half hour of our conversation, has slowly given way to free-flowing dialogue, first about the meaning behind the title of the new record. “I guess it was a lot of things,” he says. “The problems that society is facing, the things we’re feeling...it’s been the same story for at least 10,000 years, probably more. But originally, it came from a conversation I had with Jake, who’s a great speaker and mind and word engineer, and the voice of a lot of the Voidz stuff that comes out. I'll ask him questions as a joke. I think I asked, ‘How would you define everything in one word?’ and he said something like, ‘Soon we will be crusted and dusted like all before us.’ And I thought, ‘Whoa, Like All Before Us—that sounds like a book I want to read.’ So that’s where it was born. It was meant as a kind of all-encompassing, universally defining statement."
This gets us talking about politics, and it becomes eminently clear that Julian has a lot to get off his chest. We end up in a philosophical sparring session, during which he diagnoses the crux of modern society’s ills and the mechanism through which they persist (“Deception is the tool, and money is the weapon—or maybe it’s the other way around”) and ends up talking about the deep political divide in America. I ask him how he thinks we might overcome it, and a cloud of solemnity crosses his face. “That’s the question at the cutting edge of today’s creative mind. That’s our job.” I don’t bother to mention that, in all likelihood, there are thousands of creative minds for whom such a question is—amidst notions of marketability, virality, and data-driven content creation—probably the very last consideration.
Casablancas has garnered criticism for being a conspiracy theorist, and it’s clear that he doesn’t try to contain his enthusiasm for taboo political discourse. That said, I didn’t find his opinions to be all that farfetched. He mentions that “there were half a million children starving in Iraq, and you can trace that to The New York Times convincing everyone that Iraq was going to conquer the world, or whatever.” This is defensible—one only has to turn a keen eye toward the headlines of some major publications to realize the extent to which editorial biases justify violence against the feeble and helpless. Political opinions aside, I find Julian’s sentiment (“That’s our job”) to be genuinely moving. Here is an individual who has, in many ways, conquered his industry. He’s written seminal, groundbreaking records, enjoys a massive, loyalist fan base, and can comfortably sell out venues across the world. And yet, rather than resting on his laurels, he has instead decided to embark on an earnest quest for meaningful change.
Eventually, the afternoon grows old, and the candle on our table drowns in its wax. Julian’s manager comes over and informs him that it’s time to go, but not before we exchange numbers. The next day, he sends me an invite to the new album’s release party, in the basement of a dive bar just south of Tompkins Square Park. I show up late, and the night passes quickly. Just after 12, I find myself in a narrow smoking area, deep in conversation with the owner of a gourmet restaurant a few blocks away. Behind him, the loudmouthed daughter of a billionaire is chatting with a sleazy nightlife photographer. A friend grabs my shoulder and pulls me inside, where dozens of scenesters, artists, and groupies are throwing shapes on the dance floor—but Julian is nowhere to be found. Then, as the hour wanes, his tall frame emerges like an apparition, skulking just outside a private room at the back of the bar. A beat passes, maybe two, and the opening verse of “All the Same” starts to play through the loudspeaker: “Oh, I was wrong, I was wrong. Now I’m a lonely boy. I’m gonna disappear into thin air.” And he does.
