Hi there! I have a new book coming out on Sept. 8. It’s called Is This It: The Never Ending Rise and Fall Of The Strokes (and Rock ‘n’ Roll). I want to tell you a bit about it, with the intention of convincing you to pre-order. (You can do it here!) Because I think it’s a good book. And because I want to write more books in the future, and selling books in the present is the best way to make that happen.

Before we get to that, an admission: Ordering a book just under five months before you get to read it seems a bit, well, preemptive. I recognize this. And, normally, I would just say, Buy it when you can actually hold it in your hands in a store. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work. And if that’s how you want to do it, that’s awesome, I think you for your support. However, as an author, I must make an additional admission: Preorders really help me! When you preorder a book, it’s like a flashing red light for book sellers that screams: Hey, people really want to read this for some reason! And that creates momentum which leads to more promotion and, ideally, more eyeballs. Let me tell you: Eyeballs are an extremely precious commodity in my business. Optometrists have nothing on writers when it comes to valuing that particular body part.

Enough about that. Let’s focus on you. Why should you read Is This It? Well, for starters, you’re here, which presumes an interest in my writing. And if you care about my writing, you probably care about rock bands. My last several books have delved into the careers of three big ones: Radiohead, Pearl Jam, and Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band. Now, with Is This It, I’m talking about the most iconic, polarizing, frustrating, and (yes) often great and always fascinating band of the 21st century.

(By the way, I mostly appreciate The Strokes announcing a new album set for release this summer, Reality Awaits, just early enough for me to quickly shoehorn a mention or two into my manuscript, and just late enough that I won’t be able to write about it any more than that. An accident, of course, but very on brand for them.)

I wanted to write about The Strokes for two reasons. One, I’m a fan! And I really love writing about them. Their 2001 debut Is This It is one of this century’s unquestioned rock classics. Judging by retrospective “greatest albums of all time” lists, it’s sort of the only rock album from the last 25 years that matters at all. I write a lot about Is This It in my book (along with all the other Strokes albums, save Reality Awaits), but I also focus a great deal on the long tail of that record, and the ways that The Strokes’ career is frequently framed as a disappointment in light of that promising opening salvo. I think that’s unfair, for the record, though I also spend a lot of time looking at how Julian Casablancas — a man as talented as he is inscrutable — has himself perpetuated that view, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not.

This, to me, is the crux of the book: The duality of The Strokes being this quintessential rock band for a generation of listeners — multiple generations at this point — while at the same time constantly being defined by their failures. This leads to the second reason why I wanted to write this book, which is more of a big-picture idea: Writing about The Strokes is also a way to write about the evolution (or de-evolution) of rock bands in the 21st century.

When people looked at The Strokes in 2001, they saw pieces of every rock band they loved from the 20th century, and transferred those feelings on to them, for better or worse. In my book I write about the 5x5 Continuum, a pocket history of five-piece rock bands from each decade of the late 20th century — the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Guns N’ Roses, and Oasis — culminating with The Strokes. And I write about how The Strokes subsequently inspired other groups, either directly as a model or as a counter-example of how not to be. I also write about the “revolutionary cycles” of old, the idea that a band (like Nirvana, to name the most obvious example) can “take over” the mainstream and transform it, the very thing music critics in 2001 envisioned for The Strokes, and why that doesn’t seem to happen anymore. (Or happen the way it used to, anyway).

Let me put it this way: Twenty-five years ago, The Strokes were talked about constantly as the band that was going to “save” rock music. This book is about the last moment in modern history when you could talk about a band “saving” rock music without a trace of irony.

To better get at this idea and how it connects to The Strokes’ story, I also wrote about a lot of bands whose careers played out (at least in part) in parallel to theirs, including: The Killers, Kings Of Leon, The White Stripes, Interpol, Guided By Voices, LCD Soundsystem, The National, Vampire Weekend, Haim, Car Seat Headrest, and Parquet Courts. There are also pitstops with The Vines, The Hives, Jet, The Dare, and Geese.

Like I said, I think it’s a good book! If you like my other books, this fits with my ongoing interest in charting the topography of big-time rock groups in a way that’s (hopefully) not completely in the past tense. It’s pretty funny, too, and it should appeal to music fans who either grew up with this music or came to it later. (Younger generations, funny enough, are probably less cynical about The Strokes than people my age.)

So, that’s my pitch. Is This It: The Never Ending Rise and Fall Of The Strokes (and Rock ‘n’ Roll) comes out Sept. 8 and you can grab it here as a hardcover, ebook, or audiobook (which will be read by me!)