Review: The Voidz – Like All Before You

The Voidz
Like All Before You
Cult Records
Street: 09.20
The Voidz = The Strokes’ Comedown Machine + Deep-Fried Image Generator

I’m a Julian Casablancas apologist at heart and still prop up many of the infamous late-era The Strokes projects that, in 2013, culminated in Comedown Machine, the lowest-rated album for The Strokes. It’s the one that lead Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone to write, “It’s not totally clear why The Strokes make albums, is it? They don’t seem to enjoy it much, and they’re aren’t exactly bursting with innovative musical ideas that demand to be let loose.” It’s hard to disagree with him, and the same feeling is present even on their Grammy-winning comeback album The New Abnormal, which, if not for COVID-19 and a general poor output in rock albums that year (save for Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters), wouldn’t have even blipped on most people’s radars. It’s well known, too, that much of tracks on Comedown Machine were tests for Casablanca’s new side project The Voidz. Originally Julian Casablancas + The Voidz, the groundbreaking NYC alt-rock sensation joined up with Jeramy “Beardo” Gritter (guitar), Amir Yaghmai (guitar), Jake Bercovici (bass, synthesizers), Alex Carapetis (drums) and Jeff Kite (keyboards) to create the very poorly received album Tyranny, which Larry Fitzmaurice called “a spectacular failure”. 

I must seem like a liar calling myself an apologist while spending the first bit of this review tearing down Casablancas’ hard work, but I do believe there is a lot to love throughout The Strokes’ dark era (First Impressions of Earth, Angels and Comedown Machine) and I listen to all of these albums straight through fairly often. Hell, there’s a lot to love on Casablancas’ confusing power-rock solo album Phrazes for the Young. For me, it all comes down to a lot of nostalgia. My mother was a fan of The Strokes back when it was cool in 2004, when I was four years old and going to preschool. On car rides with me she would play Room On Fire and Is This It?, so they are forever ingrained in my memory and remind me of both growing up and my mother. The Voidz’ second album Virtue is a refreshing and interesting pop/electronic alt-rock album that while it has plenty of hits, has just as many skips. The opening track, “Leave It In My Dreams,” is filled to the brim with the Casablancas magic that made him the star he is. Tracks like “Wink,” “Pink Ocean,” and “QYURRYUS” are genuinely fun and demonstrate the new group finding their feet beneath them. Though the band played a ton of international shows in the years following the release of Virtue, they quickly fell off the face of the earth.   

The only drop of note between then and now was “Infinity Repeating,” a track that was cut from Daft Punk’s 2013 Random Access Memories and only saw the light of day through the 10th anniversary edition of the same album. Beyond that, the group has continually played huge shows in NYC and embraced a deeply unfunny character of Tron, the would-be social media manager on their Instagram account who posts unhinged rants about being fired or abused to build some form of alternate reality game, along with polls on whether or not he should commit suicide. For those who know Casablancas well, you can tell he is the one propping up this character. Though thankfully, in the last few months, he has abandoned all efforts to keep the joke rolling. One thing Casablancas won’t drop, though, is his use of AI-generated posters and images. The suicide poll image? AI. The album release day post? AI. The cover for the album we’re reviewing? You can probably already tell. The announcement for this album is flooded with tens of thousands of comments about its AI cover and has since been edited to include the line “Cover Art by @dolorsilentium,” who has dedicated his life toward replicating golden-age anime art (mostly of young girls with their tits out) with a polished metal touch. Casablancas responded in a now-deleted post to his personal account @minorbutmajor: “Sorry to The Scared Of News Tools tribe, truly, sorry. But art plops up, best idea/image/noise/ in the end should win … and i’m not ‘endorsing’ Ai, i don’t DWELL ON IT, but it’s part of culture now … Relax, it’s iphone.” The original artist the band chose to do the cover requested $150,000 for their work—a tough bill to foot with two platinum albums under your belt. Casablancas later posted a screencap of the original art in an Instagram carousel with an image of him getting a Victory Royale in Fortnite. Very cool! 

How is the album, though? Well, it sounds unfinished and disjointed. The majority of it covers the same topics in The New Abnormal of loneliness and abandonment. This time, though, there are more direct references to Casablancas’ divorce. “Square Wave,” “Prophecy of the Dragon,” “7 Horses,” “Spectral Analysis”—all mention being left by a partner (that’s half of the album) and most of them make him seem like the victim. Past an airy and loose intro instrumental, the first real track, “Square Wave,” gives us a fun, surfy riff that is pulled under by Casablancas’ quiet and unintelligible vocals and, in whole, feels like he is trying to replicate the magic we previously mentioned, though with a mix of Eastern Mysticism that sees Casablancas’ consulting Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and claiming to be “the one in the white van” which we can only hope is a metaphorical oversight. On the following track, “Prophecy of the Dragon,” Casablancas seeks to answer the question: “What would it feel like if God whispered into your ear, ‘You are my most magnificent creature’?” And the answer is, like any old Voidz song. While it’s one of the better tracks on the album, it isn’t all that unique. It is carefree and leans into the album’s obsession with myth and conspiracy; the final moments of the track see Casablancas’ character summon a dragon from its slumber. A highlight of the project, “Flexorcist,” came out roughly a year ago and sees the group surrender their self-importance to the greater mystery of the world: “We’re not that special / What don’t you understand / Yeah, wo-oah / You always worry / About things that just don’t matter.” Musically, the track is the tightest and best-produced on the whole project and made it into my regular rotation last year. 

The later half is a deep dive into Casablancas’ general political thesis of the modern day, which, while it has some general good (albeit generic) opinions of the current state of America, it doesn’t offer much more than “war bad” and “oppression bad.”  The second-to-last track. “When Will the Time of These Bastards End.” asks when the age of the American War Machine will collapse under its own weight, and yet, in a final variation of the chorus, betrays its own premise: “Who’s to say, who should live, who should die? / Who’s to say? Who’s to say? Not you or I / Not Ukraine but guess Yemen’s ok / Libya, that’s ok, so they say / When will the time of these bastards end? / All our best men are blacklisted or dead.” While pointing out American politics and media on the war in Ukraine and not the atrocities in Yemen, there is an obvious omission of the genocide of the Palestinian people by both Israel and the US. In an attempt to be bold and point out the contradictions of American capitalism, Casablancas shows us he isn’t really paying attention. 

One of their better demos that was leaked back in 2020 titled “Russian Coney Island,” never made it to the final track listing, even with fans predicting it would be one of the album’s main singles. In that same video, you can hear the group play a really promising early version of “All The Same,” though the final version got put through so much post-production hell that it comes out gutted on the final album. Layered with an annoying clap drum and pumped full of artificial fuzz, “All The Same” has lost what sparkle it could’ve had. Lyrically, we see Casablancas confronting the misogyny of his father and even adopting his own behavior. It’s the closest we’ll get to an honest self-examination on the whole project. 

Like All Before You is inevitably a harmless project of an aging rock-star, one who is quickly overstaying his welcome. There’s a lack of unity in sound, production and even loudness between all of the songs, proving what we probably new all along: Casablancas is done taking it seriously. –wphughes

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