At 119, a dive around the corner from the Manhattan club Irving Plaza, light from the street creeps through horizontal blinds in the front room, where dusty red velour couches sit vacant near the door. There's a pool table illuminated by a single hanging lamp, but no one's playing. In the adjacent wood-paneled barroom, three of the five Strokes — along with their seven-person entourage — are crowded into a wooden booth surrounding a wobbly table full of empty beer bottles. If there's anyone else in the bar, they surely don't notice.

Someone hands bassist Nikolai Fraiture a package wrapped in newspaper — a gift for his twenty-third birthday. Shadowed by a pageboy mop, his long face cracks with a smile as he tears the paper to find a CD Walkman. Singer Julian Casablancas turns to his girlfriend, Colleen, and bites down on her ear like it's a chew toy.

It's midwinter, and the band's members haven't seen much of one another this week during a brief break from touring. There's a call for another round of shots — Jack Daniel's — followed by a smoke for everyone except drummer Fabrizio Moretti, who shook the habit a couple of years ago. Julian lurches forward and grabs Fab's face affectionately. "Your hands are cold," the drummer admonishes.

"You know what they say," Julian counters. "Cold hands, cold heart." The two pretend to smack each other hard across the face, performing a routine they've obviously done before.

Minutes later, the group sneaks through the backstage door at Irving Plaza to catch a set by Iggy Pop, whom the Strokes met while traveling the U.K. festival circuit last summer. The guys make a rush for the balcony, drawing stares as they go.

The Strokes get stared at a lot. A gaggle of tall, skinny dudes with exquisitely messy hair, ratty, threadbare jeans and thrift-store T-shirts, they are picture-perfect scruffy downtown rockers, each with his own distinct magnetism. Julian is the surly one, his candor apt to be mistaken for asshole bravado; Fab is all sweetness and hyperactivity; Nikolai speaks softly but carries a big wit; guitarist Albert Hammond Jr. is at once suave and jittery, a slightly neurotic ladies' man; and guitarist Nick Valensi is the wide-eyed naif, sincerely polite even when he's loaded.

These are the five childhood friends who have made some of the best music to come out of New York in more than a decade. Eleven songs of springy, swaggering Seventies-style punk rock, the Strokes' debut, Is This It, sold more than 500,000 copies within five months of its release in October, igniting a boom for New York rock & roll (see "New York Rock City," page 90). "You've kind of got to ignore something long enough for it to come back," says DreamWorks Records A&R exec Luke Wood, who signed Elliott Smith and Jimmy Eat World and was among those courting the Strokes in 2001. "Now people are looking again toward the underground for great music. The Strokes are the most commercially successful act to come from such a left place in a long time. Their success has been based on their vision."