The Strokes Italy Tour 2026 — Italian Dates, Cities & Tickets

Italy Cities on the Tour

The Strokes Italy Tour — FAQ

About The Strokes

The Strokes formed in New York City in 1998 when Julian Casablancas (vocals), Nick Valensi (guitar), and Fabrizio Moretti (drums) — three friends from the Dwight School in Manhattan — began writing songs together, recruited bassist Nikolai Fraiture from Lycée Français de New York where Casablancas had also briefly attended, and rounded out the five-piece lineup with rhythm guitarist Albert Hammond Jr., the son of singer-songwriter Albert Hammond Sr., whom Casablancas had met at Le Rosey boarding school in Switzerland years earlier. The five-piece played the Lower East Side and East Village circuit — Mercury Lounge, Arlene's Grocery, the Bowery Ballroom, Don Hill's, Luna Lounge — for roughly two years, sharpened the live show into the lean, suit-and-Converse, Marshall-stacks aesthetic that would define a decade of indie rock, and self-released the three-track The Modern Age EP through Rough Trade in the UK in January 2001. The bidding war that followed was historic: more than 20 labels in the running, the band ultimately signing with RCA in the US and Rough Trade in the UK, and the resulting debut album Is This It released in Australia and the UK in July 2001 and in the US in October 2001 with a revised cover and a substituted track (New York City Cops swapped out post-9/11 in the US edition). Is This It hit number two in the UK, certified platinum in multiple territories, and has since been ranked as the greatest album of the 2000s by Rolling Stone, NME, and Pitchfork among others — a record whose influence on the Killers, Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Libertines, Bloc Party, the Kooks, and effectively every guitar band of the next decade is impossible to overstate. Room on Fire (October 2003) doubled down on the formula with 12:51, Reptilia, and Under Control. First Impressions of Earth (January 2006) was the band's most ambitious record — 14 tracks, longer arrangements, the singles Juicebox, Heart in a Cage, and You Only Live Once — but also began the long internal stretch that saw the members pursue solo work: Casablancas with Phrazes for the Young (2009) and the Voidz, Hammond Jr. with multiple solo records starting with Yours to Keep (2006), Valensi with CRX, Moretti with Little Joy. Angles (March 2011) reunited the five-piece after a five-year hiatus and produced Under Cover of Darkness and Taken for a Fool. Comedown Machine (March 2013) closed the band's RCA contract. After a seven-year studio gap and a series of EPs and festival appearances, the Rick Rubin-produced The New Abnormal arrived in April 2020 with At the Door, Bad Decisions, The Adults Are Talking, and Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus — and won the Grammy for Best Rock Album in March 2021, the band's first Grammy in five nominations across a 20-year career. Across the run the Strokes have released six studio albums on RCA and Cult Records, sold an estimated 14 million records worldwide, kept the original five-man lineup intact across every record and tour, and watched their debut record become a permanent fixture at the top of every 21st-century best-of list it appears on.

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