THE STROKES altered the course of pop with their first album, Is This It. Suddenly, after its release in 2001, international acclaim was just a scissor-kick away for a new generation of indie-rock upstarts, from the White Stripes to the Vines to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Devising the follow-up to such an epoch-making album brings new anxieties for the group. Can they do it again? And for the critic, there is the danger of scattering rating stars like confetti only to find in three months that it has no legs — what we might call the Be Here Now syndrome, after the instantly lauded, but subsequently much offloaded, third album by Oasis.

A mere 33 minutes long, Room on Fire is a slender offering. It is certainly quicker to listen to it than to wade through the hyperbole already lavished on it in the music press. There is not an ounce of musical fat anywhere: no additional instrumentation, no harmony vocals, no middle-eights, no waffling grooves, no endings that are anything other than brutally, or sometimes comically, abrupt. The interplay between the guitars is breathtakingly clever, never more so than on the psuedo-reggae, rhythmic jigsaw of Automatic Stop and the counterpointed lead and bass lines of Reptilia.

The singer Julian Casablancas also has a distinctively deadpan delivery, tacking his quirky melodies on to the instrumental frameworks of the songs with mannered guile.

But the arrangements have been honed to the point where, for all the care lavished on them, some numbers sound rather perfunctory. The group has always run a tight ship, but here the ascetic approach is becoming extreme, making the album sound empty and uptight. It is like a minimalist apartment you might admire in a style magazine but you wouldn’t want to live in.

Another worrying parallel with Oasis is that for all the group’s camaraderie and cohesion, the Strokes rely entirely on the song-writing of Casablancas. He has a tremendous facility for constructing jaunty, new-wave, pop-rock songs that tug impatiently at your elbow, but he is no Lou Reed. One of his best shots here is Under Control, an untypically slow, chilled song underpinned by a delightfully lilting guitar part. But admiration is tempered because this is the first Strokes song that could remotely be called a ballad. For all Casablancas’s wit and imagination, the songwriting input is beginning to sound limited.

He is a master of the resonant, rock’n’roll one-liner: “We was tense, but we was confident”; “I come together in the middle of the night” and so forth. But when strung together his words tend to amount to a lot of arty nonsense. Only on The Way It Is does he maintain a coherent thread, as he flushes out a failing relationship with an icy jet of honesty: “It’s not your fault . . . I’m sick of you/And that’s the way it is/And will always be”.

The Strokes have done their best to produce an album that justifies the hysteria surrounding its release, and it is not their fault that they no longer have the element of surprise. Room on Fire is a worthy companion piece to Is This It. But perhaps they should spend less time agonising over their music, and let it grow instead.

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