The Walkmen made the best “New York rock revival” album of the 2000s

“What’s in it for me?” 

It’s a damn good question, one that Hamilton Leithauser asks, twice, to open The Walkmen’s second album, Bows + Arrows, his voice hovering above a vintage organ that’s somehow both throbbingly loud and pretty, a fitting setting for our narrator, who seems to be a combination of hurt, wistful, irked, and, perhaps, drunk. “I came here for a good time,” he continues, “and you’re telling me to leave,” the rest of the band falling in with shimmering guitar pickings, a chugging-along drumbeat, and a blanket of warm reverb. “But you don’t have to say it again,” he goes on, petulant, “’cause I heard you the first time.” 

The first time I heard this song, I fell in love with it, like when you meet someone who you know gets you, someone you know is going to be around for a while. I didn’t know then, in the summer of 2004, that The Walkmen would become the band I saw play the most; that they’d end up soundtracking so many of the ups and downs and friendships and relationships of my twenties; or that, nine years later, in the summer of 2013, I’d see them play their last New York show (before their 2023 reunion) in McCarren Park, which I just happened to be walking by. 

When Bows + Arrows‘ second track, “The Rat,” started on my Discman, busting in like an angrier version of The Stones’ “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” I thought, of course, this is that band, having heard the song but not yet listened to it. That tonal transition, from “What’s In It For Me” to “The Rat,” practically announced, “This is what we can do,” not unlike The Velvet Underground & Nico starting with the prettiest hangover song ever, “Sunday Morning,” and then doing an about-face with the primitive, subway-train thrum of “I’m Waiting For The Man.” Like the Velvets, they obviously had range within their very identifiable sound.

And like Nico, Bows + Arrows just feels like New York, with songs such as the gorgeous “138th Street” evoking riding through the city at night, the sloppy-on purpose strumming of “The North Pole” and its Monday morning trains uptown and Friday buses “back down,” the left-turn piano piece “Hang On, Siobhan,” with the lyrics, “It’s four in the morning, the bars are unloading,” and “Thinking Of A Dream I Had” rumbling like you’re flying on the L train under the East River, buzzing in anticipation of another big night.  

The Walkmen formed in 2000—the same year as Yeah Yeah Yeahs and not many after The Strokes and Interpol—as a mashup of two dissolved bands: Jonathan Fire*Eater and The Recoys. The former outfit (with future Walkmen guitarist Paul Maroon, drummer Matt Barrick, and organist/keyboardist Walter Martin) was a big deal–or at least was supposed to be. If you’ve read Lizzy Goodman’s fantastic oral history Meet Me In The Bathroom: Rebirth And Rock And Roll In New York City 2001–2011, you know their story, as the ’90s, Stewart Lupton-fronted outfit is the first one explored, making the case that The Strokes didn’t just pop up out of nowhere.  The Recoys, which included future Walkmen singer Leithauser and bassist Peter Bauer, didn’t catch on (but had some great tracks and a few The Walkmen would later record).  

The first song The Walkmen wrote was the piano-melody-led “We’ve Been Had,” from 2002’s excellent Everyone Who Pretended To Like Me Is Gone, and you can see traces of it in just about everything the band made after. “It was harder to say what this music was, but the external drive was to get away from being rock-and-roll rock and roll,” Maroon explains in Goodman’s book. “We just wanted everything to be weird.”

Weird isn’t the first adjective that springs to mind with that debut LP, but it certainly had less nocturnal swagger than Fire*Eater. And in comparison to Bows + Arrows, Everyone sounds much looser, occasionally juxtaposing gentle piano with raw guitars and booming drums. On Bows, the band comes off as more well defined and confident, with Leithauser singing noticeably louder, often straining to hit notes. The shift from their freshman to sophomore record feels akin to seeing a movie you love at home and then experiencing it in a theater in 70 millimeter, with everything feeling brighter and bigger. The rockers on Bows—“The Rat,” “Little House Of Savages,” which they “played” on The O.C.(!), “The North Pole,” and “Thinking Of A Dream I Had,” the back half of which should, seriously, be analyzed in any college course on rock and roll—feel like they could only have come out in the Meet Me In the Bathroom era. 

And while this record isn’t that extended moment’s most iconic (that’d be The Strokes’ phenomenal Is This It), moody (Interpol’s Turn On The Bright Lights), dance-floor-ready (The Rapture’s Echoes), or flat-out fun (Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Fever To Tell), it has a range that puts it a smidge above those and makes it more timeless, with the occasional soft curveball/comedown, like the delicate “Hang On, Siobhan” or, per the Life Of The Record podcast, The Pogues-inspired dirge “No Christmas While I’m Talking.” Bows’ lyrics, too, seem to have a wider scope. For all of the “What’s in it for me?” posturing and clever observations like, “When I used to go out, I would know everyone that I saw / Now I go out alone, if I go out at all,” not to mention “I’ll take your hand and another one-night stand” and talk of jealousy, infidelity and heartsickness, there is a lot of thoughtful, in-the-moment reflection. 

Yeah Yeah Yeahs nailed date-with-the-night hedonism, and The Strokes blanketed those hard-to-explain musings from the coolest-looking guy at the bar in a ridiculously catchy sound, but Leithauser’s lyrics tap into the more complex feelings and pressure of when you’re young and in a big city and trying to make something, as if he knows this is all fleeting, as if he knows all of those ambitions could—poof—just evaporate. To quote the last line in “138th Street,” a song that conjures images of disappearing friends, buying a house, getting a real job, and marriage: “And someday, when you turn around, you’ll see the door is closing.” 

Back then, being lumped with their peers, with that hype, seemed to bug them. And it happened plenty. In his review of B+A for Entertainment Weekly, David Browne writes, “The Walkmen share several traits with their Manhattan neighbors The Strokes. Singer and guitarist Hamilton Leithauser has the same enervated delivery as Julian Casablancas, and the music is similarly rooted in the guitar drone of The Velvet Underground and Television.” The great critic Philip Sherburne, in a 2004 Slate essay defending the Brooklyn band Liars, also compares them to The Strokes, saying both outfits “have revived the scuzzy, moody sound of [those two aforementioned, iconic NYC groups],” as well as Yeah Yeah Yeahs. In Meet Me, Bauer explains, “We always fought being associated with that downtown New York band world, to the point of detriment.” Detriment or not, he makes a good point: The Walkmen, while very much born into and a part of what the media talked about when they talked about cool New York bands of the early 2000s, seemed to exist, somehow, just outside of it. 

It’s really no wonder that, four years later, they’d release a very different masterpiece, You & Me, one with standouts like the mellow, horn-laced “Red Moon.” This is, besides, a band that has just as much affinity for any of those press-invoked influences as Leonard Cohen and classical music. As Matt Berninger, the singer of The National, puts it in Goodman’s book: “The Strokes are undeniable, but for me The Walkmen were the New York band that I held in high regard on multiple levels: cool factor, songwriting, inventiveness, originality.”

That sentiment still rings true to me today. In 2023, a full decade since I’d last caught them, I flew to Chicago to see The Walkmen, twice, at the Metro. Leithauser still approached the mic like a boxer, belting out lyrics, and Barrick pounded his barebones kit, bouncing up and down as if Bush was in the White House. It was like nothing had changed, although everything had, and it spoke to that truest of pop-culture truisms: The best stuff doesn’t go out of style.