SPIN

On March 22, the Strokes return with Angles (RCA), their first studio album since 2006. In SPIN's April issue, Sloane Crosley, best-selling author of I Was Told There'd Be Cake, talks with the band a decade after their 2001 debut, Is This It, defined postmillennial downtown cool.

The guys were photographed by Dan Martensen at Manhattan's Milk Studios. You can see outtakes from the shoot, along with excerpts from Crosley's cover story, here.

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(From left: Fabrizio Moretti, Julian Casablancas, Nick Valensi, Albert Hammond Jr., Nikolai Fraiture)

The Strokes roared back last summer, playing their first U.S. show in over four years at Chicago's Lollapalooza. "I was afraid we'd be forgotten and all the work would be for naught — we're not the fucking Beatles," guitarist Nick Valensi (left) tells SPIN. "That didn't happen. As soon as we got back together… people wanted to pay us more money than we had ever seen in our lives." (Guitarist Albert Hammond Jr., right)

For Angles, frontman Casablancas (left), the band's chief songwriter who held sway on their previous albums, recorded his vocals separately from the other four members (including drummer Fabrizio Moretti, right), who wrote and recorded together at guitarist Albert Hammond Jr.'s home in upstate New York.

With all five band members contributing ideas, Angles "reminds you why they were so irresistible in the first place," SPIN contributor Mikael Wood writes in our album review. "Angles isn't a strict return to the bare-bones essentialism of Is This It. It skips from the echoing electro-pop beat in 'Games' to the unctuous new-wave sheen of 'Two Kinds of Happiness,' but like the group's instant-classic early singles, swinging new tunes such as 'Gratisfaction' and 'Under Cover of Darkness' tap into a giddy insouciance that feels distinctly Strokes-y."

(From left: Casablancas, Moretti, Hammond, Fraiture, Valensi)

The road to the Strokes' return had its obstacles, though, including Hammond's drug problem, which sidelined sessions for Angles in 2009. "I guess you could say I wasn't really there when we started it," says Hammond (left), who entered rehab in late 2009, but soon returned to work on the LP. "I wasn't on any chemicals. It was hard — you have two good years of post-acute withdrawal," he says. "I was nervous and couldn't remember things. It's like having a stroke, no pun intended." (Casablancas, center, and Moretti)

During the band's hiatus, four of the five members of the Strokes launched solo or side-projects. Casablancas released 2009's solo debut Phrazes for the Young; Fraiture (left) recorded an LP as Nickel Eye, featuring guests Regina Spektor and Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner; Hammond released two solo albums and toured; and Moretti formed the side-project Little Joy with his girlfriend, Binki Shapiro. Valensi (right) instead focused on being a father to his twin daughters.

The Strokes recently performed their first gig in support of Angles, in Las Vegas. The band will also play SXSW, Coachella, and Bonnaroo this year, and will stage a much-anticipated hometown show at Madison Square Garden on April 1.