Modern English joke that the Strokes took their song I Melt With You

Modern English have finally said out loud what listeners worked out six years ago: that Bad Decisions, the second single the Strokes released from The New Abnormal in 2020, sounds a great deal like I Melt With You. The band made the point in a video posted on Monday and captioned as a beef, which is roughly the opposite of how a grievance of this kind usually gets aired.

I Melt With You came out in 1982 and became the song the band is known for, the one that outlived the post-punk scene it emerged from and turned up in films, adverts and reissues for the next four decades. Bad Decisions arrived in April 2020 and carried a melodic lift that fans matched to the older song within days of its release.

What separates this from the usual plagiarism row is the tone. There is no legal claim, no publisher statement and no demand for credit in the report; there is a video, a caption and a band that appears to find the whole thing funny. Stereogum, which wrote the video up, framed the veterans as acknowledging it rather than complaining about it.

For the Strokes it lands in a year that has already given them plenty to answer for. They released their first album in six years, Reality Awaits, in the summer, and spent part of August denying that they had anything to do with an influencer campaign promoting a diss song aimed at a critic. A 1982 band pointing at a 2020 single is the gentlest item on that list.

Nothing has come back from the Strokes side, and nothing in the report suggests anyone expects it to. What the video does is settle the question of whether Modern English had noticed, which is the only part of this that was ever genuinely open, and it leaves both songs where they were in the rock canon.