The Strokes / The New Abnormal / 2020
Bad Decisions
anxious, self-aware, faintly resigned but still buoyant musically
A jittery, sample-adjacent pop-rock track built almost entirely around one confessional hook: the narrator admits, over and over, to making bad decisions in a relationship he can't quite quit. The lyric never resolves into a story so much as circles the same admission from slightly different angles, mimicking the loop of repeating a mistake.
romantic self-sabotage mutual failure to communicate nostalgia and borrowed history emotional exhaustion cyclical repetition
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addressing a lover directly, admitting fault while also implicating the other person; the voice is self-aware but not fully reliable, since it claims not to listen while also hanging on every word
What happens
The song opens on a vague, almost cinematic memory fragment before collapsing into the central refrain of admitted bad decisions. A middle section introduces imagery of conflict and self-protection, then the verses reveal a push-pull dynamic: the narrator is captivated by the other person's words but resists their influence, claims indifference to advice, and denies wanting closeness even while craving it. The bridge admits mutual failure to listen, and the song ends in fragmented, near-collapsed lines suggesting depletion and an inability to keep making even bad choices.
How it's built
Loose verse-refrain structure where the refrain (the title hook) recurs with only minor lexical variation each time, functioning less as a chorus that develops an idea and more as a mantra. The verses are short, imagistic, and non-linear, and the song ends by fragmenting into broken, half-finished phrases rather than a clean resolution, structurally enacting the theme of running out of steam.
Section by section
Opening image
“Moscow, 1972”
The song begins with a scene that feels borrowed or half-remembered rather than lived, an odd, specific historical marker with no stated connection to the relationship that follows. It functions like a dream-logic establishing shot, setting a tone of disorientation before the confessional refrain takes over.
First refrain
The hook arrives almost immediately, before any real narrative groundwork, which signals that the song is less interested in explaining the bad decisions than in performing the compulsive act of naming them. The repetition itself becomes the content.
Combat imagery interlude
“Pick up your gun”
This recurring couplet reads as a kind of internal defense mechanism, framed in the language of conflict and protection. It suggests the relationship has become adversarial, something to be armored against, even as the refrain insists on staying in it.
Contradictory verse
“don't wanna see you”
Here the narrator's devotion and avoidance sit side by side without reconciliation. The claim of hanging on every word is immediately undercut by a wish for distance, dramatizing the incoherence of staying in a decision known to be bad.
Mutual admission bridge
The brief exchange acknowledging that neither party listened to the other reframes the song's blame structure: this isn't just self-flagellation, it's a shared failure. It's the closest the song comes to clarity before it dissolves again.
Closing fragmentation
The final stretch breaks down into stammering, unfinished thoughts, suggesting the narrator has exhausted even the capacity for further bad decisions. The collapse in language enacts a kind of emotional depletion rather than describing it outright.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated opening of the refrain hammers the same self-accusation until it starts to feel involuntary, like a tic rather than a statement.
- imagistic juxtaposition
- A dropped-in historical/geographic image early on has no explicit connection to what follows, creating a disorienting, dreamlike frame that primes the listener for the song's non-linear emotional logic.
- contradiction as characterization
- The narrator claims both total absorption in the partner's words and total disregard for their advice, and this isn't smoothed over -- the tension itself communicates confusion and denial.
- syntactic breakdown
- The final lines fracture into stammering, incomplete phrases, formally mirroring the narrator's claimed inability to continue.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a portrait of compulsive attachment -- someone narrating their own self-destructive pattern in real time without being able to stop it, the repetition of the hook mimicking the repetition of the behavior itself. A secondary reading is more meta: given the album's tendency toward pastiche and its members' well-documented history of interpersonal and substance-related struggles referenced obliquely across their catalog, the song could be read as commentary on creative or professional relationships (bandmates, industry) as much as romantic ones, since the lyric never specifies the nature of the bond, only its damage.
Context
This song appears on The New Abnormal (2020), the band's first album in seven years, produced by Rick Rubin, on which The Strokes leaned into synth textures and 80s-inflected pop songwriting while retaining Casablancas's characteristically elliptical, emotionally guarded lyric style. I don't have reliable specific biographical detail about the writing of this particular track, so this context is general rather than song-specific.
Listen for
- how the refrain's melody stays essentially static while the surrounding synth textures shift, reinforcing the sense of being stuck
- the tonal gap between the buoyant, danceable instrumentation and the confessional, almost defeated lyric content
- the moment the narrator's stated devotion and stated avoidance appear back to back without transition
- the vocal delivery in the final section, where the lines audibly break down into repeated stammering
About The Strokes
The Strokes are an American rock band from New York City, New York, that formed in 1998. The band is composed of lead singer and primary songwriter Julian Casablancas, guitarists Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr., bassist Nikolai Fraiture, and drummer Fabrizio Moretti.
1998 - present / United States
Full biography and catalogue