NEW YORK GROOVE

Those who learned their first chords playing along to Last Nite might wince a little, but The Strokes’ debut album, Is This It, is now 20 years old. In the following years, there has been such an unstoppable tide of popular culture that it’s easy to forget the record’s impact. Is This It was typical of The Strokes’ Janus-faced sound. At once they were referencing the treble-forward jangle of classic American indie and garage rock, and yet they sounded so fresh – proving that it is hard to sound stale when you put so much treble in your guitar sound.

- Jonathan Horsley

Musically, the biggest lesson to take from Is This It is that our jobs as guitar players is to get out of the way of the vocals. Nick Valensi favoured hollow body electrics such as the Epiphone Riviera, while Albert Hammond Jr preferred a 1985 70s-reissue Fender Stratocaster in Olympic White. Occasionally there would be a Les Paul Jr in the mix, too. These went into a minima