I’ve been listening to an advance copy of the Strokes’ debut, Is This It (RCA), for about a month now, but in the past week it has become a different album. And not just because " New York City Cops, " a song that’s already been released as a single, is being replaced on the version of the full-length that will now hit streets on October 9. The song wasn’t really about cops: like much of the album, it’s about the city of walls the singer builds to keep lovers and cities from toppling his heart, but the chorus — " New York City cops/They ain’t too smart " — was deemed inappropriate, even though the lyric is just something the singer’s girlfriend says, a refrain he can’t get out of his head. The walls do not hold, the world has come rushing in, and, perhaps inevitably, Is This It is being called upon to reflect a city suddenly very different from the one that formed it.

The Strokes are five boys from prep-school Manhattan who took the city by storm; they were selling out downtown clubs and appearing in Rolling Stone before their first single hit these shores, and by the time that single, " The Modern Age, " was released, they were already the subject of a furious major-label bidding war. They were, in every sense, a New York band: precocious, brilliant, cocky, aloof. New Yorkers saw a vision of themselves confirmed and an inheritance passed along. Julian Casablancas’s bleary rasp could have come only from listening to the young Lou Reed, with its casual arrogance, its over-bored-and-self-assuredness, weary and feral in the same breath. The band shadow the Velvets’ two-chord strum, and Television’s tense deliberation, and the defiant ebullience of Lust for Life–era Iggy Pop, but theirs is as deft a reinvention as any of their predecessors, familiar in new ways. As much as anything, New Yorkers must have recognized Casablancas’s way of looking at the world: only in NYC could stealing someone’s car be construed as a come-on, as on the Strokes’ " Barely Legal. "

Is This It is one of the better albums ever written about a New York City state of mind, easily the best since Sonic Youth’s NYC Ghosts & Flowers, and catchier, to boot. But what does it mean to be a New York band right now? " If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere, " Frank Sinatra famously sang of the city that never sleeps. Just the other night, UN secretary general Kofi Anan emerged from the smoking rubble at ground zero and uttered words that seem destined to replace " New York, New York " as Gotham’s new refrain: " If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere. " Which is not quite saying the same thing.

On " The Modern Age, " Casablancas is looking back: " Up on a hill is where we begin/This little story, a long time ago. " It seems much longer ago now. It seems like a fable of a city. Is This It is an album meant for eyes that have seen it all too many times for anything to register as new, an album about ragged selves emerging from a philosophy of metropolitan polity carved out of fractious dissent — carved out of an agreement to disagree, to stand (as one song has it) " Alone, Together. " " Alone we stand, together we fall apart/Yeah, I think I’ll be all right, " Casablancas sings on a song called " Someday. " It is difficult to avoid thinking of the Strokes not only as the latest New York band but as the last.

As " New York City Cops " is written off the album — as the old New York measures itself warily against the new and finds some loose ends to be tied up — I find myself projecting the New York of my television screen onto Is This It. The title track becomes an apocalyptic and unanswerable question; " Last Nite, " with its warming opening chords reminiscent of the Velvets’ " Beginning To See the Light, " assumes a brutal optimism and an unbearable sadness I can only barely attribute to any of its lyrics. " I feel so down, and I don’t know why, I keep walkin’ for miles, " Julian sings, and I see powdered faces. Because this is what we do, this is what music does.

" The thing we’ve learned in New York, a city of great generosity, spirit, and sorrow, " the Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez wrote last week, " is that our lives are not our own. " Unacceptable. Is This It was not written about a city of great generosity, and its spirit and sorrow are of a different sort altogether. I’m listening to the album now, the last song, and I hear a voice that refuses all reconciliation: he’s threatening to leave and telling you to get out: " Take it or leave it, take it or leave it, " over and over, as if those were the only options.