‘Is This It’: the best-performing indie rock album of 2001

Posted On June 18, 2025June 18, 2025

Despite MTV 2 having launched in 1996 and delivered plenty of alternatives to the mainstream, it wasn’t until the beginning of the following decade that a new band would emerge and be hailed as the saviours of rock music as we know it. Around this time, The Strokes were everywhere on the channel and beyond, and were undoubtedly the rock gods we had all craved, delivering a more carefree brand of rock music than the self-serious Radiohead and the Beatles-aping Oasis were coming up with.

Now, rock music didn’t actually need saving, as it was febrile and fertile as ever towards the tail end of the 1990s. However, it didn’t necessarily have the mainstream crossover appeal that The Strokes had, and because what they promised didn’t need to be cerebral or try to reinvent the wheel, they just needed to have an attitude about them in order to gain attention, which they succeeded in doing with aplomb.

Again, I know what you’re going to say, is it rock? Well, yes, it’s ‘indie rock’ to be precise, although it borrowed heavily from post-punk and art-rock from the 1970s, such as Television and The Velvet Underground, in its delivery. Not only were critics bending over backwards to praise it, but the band had released a number of singles like ‘Last Nite’, ‘Someday’ and ‘Hard to Explain’ in their breakthrough year that would become indie disco staples in the subsequent years.

But, for all of the buzz that surrounded their debut album, Is This It, was it really as impactful as one might think? If it was indeed the album to save rock and roll, then surely it would’ve been competing with the records of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd in terms of astronomical levels of record sales, but the truth is, it was far from the roaring success it was made out to be.

Which indie rock albums outsold Is This It in 2001?

If you’re going to look at its overall performance compared to every other album released in the same year, Is This It stands as only the 108th most-purchased record from 2001, and while it comes behind a lot of pop albums, compilations and soundtracks that are always destined to shift the highest figures, this does seem low for a record that was hailed as being able to offer a lifeline to a supposedly ailing genre.

Being new to the scene, it was always going to be tough for The Strokes to top those who had already had an impact on the industry already, and despite them offering an antidote to the increasingly bleak and boundary-pushing music of Radiohead, Amnesiac has outsold it significantly, reaching 2.5million sales compared to the 1.7million achieved by The Strokes.

If we’re to broaden the scope of what constitutes indie rock, then there are plenty of others that outperformed The Strokes from this year, with Gorillaz being the best of the bunch with their self-titled debut album. Despite having hip-hop elements being incorporated into the mix, it was a project helmed by already-established indie darling Damon Albarn of Blur fame, and also had the gimmick of being presented as an animated fictional band playing into its hands. It’s not strictly indie rock, but it’s the 11th-best-selling record from 2001, clocking in at 7million sales since release.

You might also want to argue that Drops of Jupiter by Train is indie rock, although it was bands like this who were also being given the dubious honour of marking the simultaneous downfall of rock music, with their inoffensive and lifeless commercialisation of rock music somehow managing to shift 3.5million copies over the years.

Others that outperformed The Strokes from the broader rock sphere include Lenny Kravitz, No Doubt and Stereophonics, who, while not in the same broad field as The Strokes, still do a lot of legwork to prove that rock was not ‘dying’, but was happily going about its business. You’ve also got the hugely popular pop-punk movement that brought the world acts like Blink-182, who racked up 8million sales for Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, and the experimental metal acts like System of a Down and Tool, whose albums Toxicity and Lateralus were multi-million selling albums from 2001.

In addition to this, there was also the nascent nu-metal scene that saw bands like Nickelback, Staind and Slipknot release records that had greater success than The Strokes in 2001, and you can’t ignore the fact that Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory from the year before, which continued to perform at the highest level, was also a signal that rock was evolving and continuing to court success more so than the new generation of indie rock upstarts.

Critically speaking, Is This It certainly helped usher in a new era of indie rock and presented it with a new flagship group for everyone to fawn over. However, if we’re to measure its success on sales alone, we’re faced with the harsh reality that they were never going to defeat the other strands of rock music that already existed and were already significantly more popular, and they certainly weren’t going to trump the giants of decades before.

However, does that take away from the fact that Is This It was a trailblazing album that kick-started an entirely new generation of guitar-led groups? Absolutely not. If it wasn’t for Is This It, there may not have been room for acts like The White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand and Arctic Monkeys to achieve similar levels of success later in the decade, and they may have all flown completely under the radar of the mainstream with their new approach to raucous indie rock.

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