Strokes guitarist Nick Valensi emerges with new band CRX
Three years ago, Nick Valensi was facing an existential crisis. The guitarist’s band the Strokes had just released its fifth album, Comedown Machine, but no tour was planned. And with every other member of the group but him having flown solo after its landmark 2001 debut Is This It, he desperately wanted to return to performing. But whose songs would he play? And who could possibly sing them? Finally, he launched his own side project, the Cars-and-Cheap-Trick-inspired CRX, with a new Josh Homme-produced punk/pop debut disc, New Skin, which the band will back by tooling through nightclubs in a cramped van and bunking in dinky motels.
“I don’t view it as not having gone anywhere—I look at like I’ve come full circle,” he says.
Valensi wasn’t twiddling his thumbs. He’d stayed busy collaborating with artists like Sia, Devendra Banhart and B-52s anchor Kate Pierson, and he’d overseen the launch of his signature guitar line with Epiphone. But he, his significant other Amanda de Cadenet and their twin children had also relocated to L.A. from the Strokes’ home turf of New York City, where he was reveling in quiet home life.
“I’ve always appreciated my down time—I just love being a dad,” says the 35-year-old. “But my kids are a little older now, and it got to a point where I was really hungry to get back onstage and tour. So I didn’t really have any desire to do my own project. Until I did.”
Valensi had only sung harmony vocals behind Strokes bandleader Julian Casablancas and learned singing lead wasn’t easy. Thus began a full year of woodshedding, wherein he laptop-tracked his vocals every day, often experimenting in difficult keys, until he was comfortable with the playback. The next hurdle: lyrics. He’d only contributed occasional Strokes verses. So what did he have to say, exactly? Backed by Guards guitarist/keyboardist Richie Follin, Rondelles strummer Darian Zahedi, bassist Jon Safley and drummer Ralph Alexander, he set out to find his voice.
Valensi arrived at a sleek, cynical sneer—and alienated world view—on chugging keyboard-buttressed anthems like “Anything,” “Monkey Machine,” “Ways To Fake It” and the Strokes-ish “Walls,” on which he growls, “We won’t be sure what’s legendary/Until we read the obituary/I don’t even know what to make of it/When everyone is faking it.”
“It wasn’t until I was done recording New Skin that I stepped back and went, ‘Whoa—I sing about authenticity, and questioning it, a lot,’” he says. “I’m expressing frustration at the amount of phoniness in the world, which starts with reality TV and continues into social media.”
Homme was the final piece of the CRX puzzle. “Right when he came on board, his first thing was, ‘Look, we are not gonna make this sound like Queens Of The Stone Age,’” says Valensi. “And part of me was sad, like, ‘Why wouldn’t we wanna do that?’ But Josh wanted to make my songs as great as possible, and he wanted to challenge himself and capture sounds that he hadn’t before. So we just kept chipping away at the old stone.”
—Tom Lanham
