Is This It

Released 9 October 2001 via RCA in the US, Is This It was recorded by Gordon Raphael in March and April 2001 at Transporterraum, his basement studio in Manhattan's East Village, after earlier sessions with Gil Norton were scrapped. The band played mostly live to a click in a room about twenty-five feet square, and Julian Casablancas's voice ran through a small Peavey practice amp, which is where that blown-out, phoned-in snarl comes from. The sound is deliberately dry and close: Casablancas half-bored and half-pleading at the front, Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. locking their guitars into tight interlocking lines, Nikolai Fraiture and Fabrizio Moretti holding a rhythm section as steady as a machine. Eleven songs, no fat on any of them.

"Hard to Explain," "Last Nite" and "Someday" were the singles, and "Is This It," "The Modern Age" and "Barely Legal" made the case that New York had a rock band again. This copy carries the US cover, a bubble-chamber photograph of subatomic particle tracks that replaced the international gloved-hand image, and the US tracklist: the CD was pushed back from 25 September after the September 11 attacks, and "When It Started" took the place of "New York City Cops."

It made restraint sound like rebellion, and a decade of guitar bands copied the haircuts without the discipline. NME and Billboard both named it the best album of 2001. It reached No. 2 in the UK, went triple Platinum there and Platinum in the US, and sits second on The Guardian's list of the best albums of the century, a paper that in 2007 had already called it "probably the most important rock album of the past 10 years."

US CD in a jewel case, new and sealed.