Songfacts®:

• The first song to get much radio play for The Strokes, "Last Nite" is about a guy who leaves his girlfriend after she tells him she feels upset because he doesn't care about her. He then starts to get depressed and questions his choices. The song was written by the band's frontman, Julian Casablancas, and is part of their 2001 debut album, Is This It.
• The Strokes are from New York City but got a lot more love in the UK early on. The British music magazine NME placed Is This It #1 on their list of the albums of the decade. Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas said of the award: "It's totally crazy! I don't know what that means. Does it mean it's a good musical decade or a bad musical decade? I don't know, I'm such a bad judge of my own stuff. But I thought it was great when I heard. Recording the album was fun, it was stressing, it was exciting. I think if I was to know then that I'd be having this conversation now I couldn't be more pleased. I'm restraining myself now, I don't want to get carried away, but I'm pretty damn psyched with myself. Mental high five!"
• Julian Casablancas told producer Gordon Raphael he wanted the song to sound "like a band from the past that took a time-trip into the future." That raw, throwback rock sound was big in the early 2000s, with The White Stripes leading the way. Other acts that caught this wave include The Vines and Jet.
• The video was directed by Roman Coppola, son of Francis Ford Coppola and brother of Sofia. The scene in which Casablancas throws his microphone stand was later referenced by The Strokes on their 2011 clip for "Under Cover Of Darkness," when he says, "everybody's singing the same song for 10 years."
• Some listeners pointed out that "Last Nite" bears resemblance to the 1977 Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers hit "American Girl." Julian Casablancas explained why: "Yeah, we ripped it off."
  
  According to the band's bassist, Nikolai Fraiture, Is This It also borrowed elements from The Cure. He said: "There are some bass lines on our first album that were 100% ripped off from The Cure. We were worried about putting out the album, because we thought we'd get busted."
• In the UK, The Strokes first charted with "Modern Age" in February 2001, followed by "Hard To Explain" in July. "Last Night" reached its peak of #14 that November.
  
  The band didn't get much attention in America until late in 2001, when "Last Night" started garnering airplay. They performed the song on Saturday Night Live January 19, 2002 (it probably helped that both the band and show were headquartered in NYC), and the song reached #108 in March.
  
  This pattern of chart success in the UK but not the US held over their next two albums. In 2014, faced with diminishing returns they took a long break, returning in 2020 with the well-received album The New Abnormal.
• The original version debuted on their three-song EP The Modern Age, which - like Is This It - was recorded in Gordon Raphael's basement studio. The independent, London-based label Rough Trade got a hold of it and suddenly the demo was promoted as the NME single of the week. The band wasn't signed in the US but they appeared in the pages of Rolling Stone, which was unheard of for an unsigned group since the magazine's inception in the mid-'60s. The attention sparked a huge bidding war among major record labels that was eventually won by RCA.
• Indie pop-rockers The Morning Benders, later known as POP ETC, recorded this song in 2011 for the tribute album Stereogum Presents... Stroked: A Tribute To Is This It. Frontman Chris Chu noted:
  
  "Back when Is This It was released everyone was going crazy over how much The Strokes sounded like VU and Television and Iggy Pop. But to me, there first single 'Last Nite' always felt like a Beatles song. The way the rhythmic elements always stay out of the way of the vocal, that one note guitar line a la George Harrison, even Julian's vocal has that combo of snotty grit and melody that reminds of Lennon. But beyond all that, the reason it really feels like a Beatles song is the structure. It's classic early-Beatles Lennon, and an approach to pop structure that still hasn't really been tapped into. There's no clear verse or chorus, just one main hook and melody. The only other section is a short bridge, that really just acts as a kind of propeller for the main melody, giving it the momentum it needs to come back over and over and over again. That's good pop! And of course the middle eight is replaced by a guitar solo because, well, they're the Strokes.
  
  For our cover we turned that structure on its head. The sections still occur in the same order, but we have re-imagined them. The main 'Last Nite' melody/lyric becomes a proper verse, and the section that used to be a short bridge becomes the proper chorus/hook. At the end everything intersects with each other and we have a melodic party. Pretty fun, right?"