Julian Casablancas says The Strokes hit ‘Last Nite’ is “pretty dead to me”.
The 46-year-old musician has expressed his hatred for the band’s 2001 track after years of performing it live and confessed that he would switch the radio off if it started playing.
Quizzed on which song he can no longer listen to, Julian told The Guardian newspaper: “‘Last Nite’ by The Strokes is pretty dead to me. I’m not sure why.
“There are some others like ‘Reptilia’, ‘Hard To Explain’, ‘Someday’, ‘Take It Or Leave It’, ‘New York City Cops’ that are comparable in terms of crowd reaction that I’m not quite as sick of. If I heard it on the radio, I’d probably turn it off.”
Casablancas has previously expressed his distaste for performing The Strokes’ older hits live as he finds that the “music doesn’t move you” after playing the same tunes repeatedly.
He said in 2020: “When you’re growing up and imagining playing music, it is for the excitement, but the one aspect of doing it for a living that is a sadness you don’t anticipate is that you play songs so much, you become sick of them.
“We hadn’t played for a while. So it was still fun, but when you start playing 30 or 40 shows, the music doesn’t move you. You feel phoney. To some extent, that’s why I play with (side project) The Voidz. I couldn’t care less about playing ‘Last Nite’.”
Julian has spent almost three decades in the music industry with The Strokes and The Voidz but accepts that there will be bumps in the road when making records.
He told NME: “You can’t just expect things to happen (the way) you want.
“You always want to put something out and have everyone say, ‘Oh my god, this is the greatest thing of all time! You win the award for greatest thing ever!’
“In reality, things take a long time, and I’ve always just tried to put my head down and make things that are good.”