Conduit by machinegum | Album of the Week

In the wake of 2016’s Future Present Past, all looked finished for The Strokes. The EP’s standout “Threat of Joy” lamented the end of the band’s good old days, now living with, “the dice on parole.” With their obligations to The Strokes behind them, each band member pursued solo projects, chasing creative freedom that wasn’t available to them as a part of the legacy act. Julian preferred his experimental side act The Voidz, Albert released his fourth solo album Francis Trouble, Nick founded the metal band CRX, and Nikolai headed the super group Summer Moon. All that remained was drummer Fabrizio Moretti, who finally stepped out from behind his kit in early 2020 with artist collective machinegum.

Throughout December 2019, Hubba Bubba-colored gumball machines popped up around New York, dispensing a QR code linking to the group’s debut album Conduit. The music itself rode in the passenger seat alongside the group’s visual art experiments, launching washed-out pink art exhibits and crowdsourced music videos, with the unique album rollout generating massive hype for Fab’s first venture outside of The Strokes.

Conduit blends post punk, psychedelia, and the good parts of Angles to deliver a masterful dream pop album that arguably outperforms the rest of The Strokes’ solo output. Melodic drum machines power each track and synth brilliance crafts a multilayered vocal performance from Fab. Lyrics form wishful letters to the album’s muse, with its opening “Kubes” depicting the start of a bad breakup, moving through stages of longing and grief as the tracklist progresses until a dramatic “Hannah Hunt”-esque finale with “Knots” where the narrator recognizes that the couple is, “practicing time as strangers,” despite their love.

Given the time of its recording, the breakup theme of the album could read as Fab’s own letter to his Strokes band mates. Their early career output revived the guitar and ended the Britpop dominant era of alternative rock, but as The Strokes continued through the 2000s, critics and audiences never gave the same praise to their subsequent releases following “Is This It” despite their consistent excellence. As years of in-fighting between members reached a peak in the early 2010s, the band must have seen that their early successes had faded. Each of their respective solo projects mirror this with shifts to heavier sounds and darker themes, all odes to a moment that passed, that came and went too fast.