The Strokes stayed together “for financial reasons”.
The Juicebox hitmakers – who released their first EP in 2001 – haven’t released an album since 2020’s The New Abnormal and frontman Julian Casablancas explained he has been more focused on his other project The Voidz because The Strokes had lost “creativity”.
He told Rolling Stone Italia: “When I started making music, becoming passionate about my dreams and vision, I had a very clear idea of how I wanted things to evolve.
“My journey with the Strokes became something different from what initially attracted me to music.”
Noting bands like Bon Jovi and Green Day showed The Strokes could have “gone on forever”, he added: “We had entered a mechanism that kept us together solely for financial reasons, pushing the band’s creativity into the background.
“So I came to the conclusion that wasn’t the way I wanted to develop.
“There’s a beautiful Miles Davis quote: ‘The real risk is not changing.’ That’s why I always want to feel like I’m searching for something unexplored. If I make money, that’s fine, but I don’t want to stay still. I’m not looking for security or the status quo.
“If someone wants to keep creating, they have to be ready for change. Even if it means the death of something they held dear.”
The 46-year-old musician previously admitted The Strokes’ 2001 hit Last Nite is “pretty dead” to him and he’d switch it off if it came on the radio.
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.”
The singer 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.”