CRX: Live and Louder

Armed with his own kind of music, The Strokes’ Nick Valensi fronts his side project CRX and they’re more than ready to rock.

by Denise J. Mallabo

Courtesy of his sheer desire to perform more often than usual, Nick Valensi might be the last among his cohorts from The Strokes to start his own band, but it’s certainly worth the wait. “I spent enough time taking it easy and got a strong urge to start being on stage more, and the only way to do that was for me to write songs and form a band. The truth is, I was just kind of desperate to start playing more,” admits the guitarist, who’s now fronting his LA-based band CRX. Alongside Albert Hammond, Jr., Nick has been on guitar duties for The Strokes for around 18 years now. Though he initially didn’t really feel the need to do more, performing in front of a massive number of people for festivals and huge arenas led to a certain craving for playing in club stages and smaller intimate venues. “To have an audience that’s right there, as opposed to 50 feet away from you, I was just wanting that a lot more,” adds Nick. So the question is, what made him decide to be the singer of his West Coast project? “I didn’t grow up looking up to the singers in rock bands. I always knew that I wanted to become a guitar player at a young age. The singing thing was something that I resisted for a long time. I’m not sure why, but now that I’m doing it, I’m having a lot of fun with it,” he shares. Nick also admits that for the first time in his life, he started writing and recording songs in his computer with the actual intention of singing them and no one else in mind, saying “I just felt like I had to sing my songs if I didn’t want to have any obstacles in the way when I eventually start touring.”

Composed of Nick, guitarist Darian Zahedi, bassist Jon Safley, keyboardist Richie James Follin, and drummer Ralph Alexander, CRX isn’t an acronym for anything. “It’s an inside joke between me and the band that happened when we were recording. What it means is a mechanical sound that we were going for. It has to do with this drum machine that we were using on certain songs called the CR78, and we would mix the sound of our live drums with the drum machine.” Nick’s good friend and Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme produced CRX’s debut album entitled New Skin. Initially, Nick approached Josh after he had put together eight songs in demo form and thought that they were really rough and didn’t sound totally finished. “I played those songs for Josh because I wanted to get his opinion on them. I felt like I needed a producer to work with because the demos that I were making really sounded like demos and I needed some help in the studio,” he recalls. “My initial conversation with him was about who would be a good producer for the songs that I was writing. As we were talking, one thing led to another and I asked him if he could produce it, then he said, ‘Fuck yeah! I’ll do it!’ From then on, we just moved forward.” Their first single “Ways to Fake It” is a resonant of an early sounding Strokes tune, a comparison that Nick doesn’t really mind. “I don’t find it offensive because that’s how I play guitar and how I write music. We also have the dual-guitar thing that we do in The Strokes. I love the sound of two guitars playing together,” explains Nick. “Particularly in the guitar playing, people who love The Strokes are going to listen to this and find all the guitar sounds and arrangements familiar, but this album also has that other side to it that’s a little bit more aggressive and heavier than anything that The Strokes would do.” And speaking of The Strokes, he says that they’ve been very supportive with this new endeavor of his and mentions that they’re all in a positive place right now working on some new music that hopefully will be released soon. “I don’t know exactly when but we’re working on it,” he shares. But let’s put the focus back to CRX ‘cause they’re definitely ones to watch out for. “I think I managed to put together a really great band, and I’m psyched for people to hear our songs.”