Former Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas changing direction with the Voidz

You can take the Strokes out of New York, but you can't keep Julian Casablancas out of a deli. Old habits die hard on a groggy Monday afternoon in Beverly Hills, where the sometime lead singer of the most lionized Gotham band of the early 2000s is waking up to a lox and bagel breakfast at 3:30 p.m.

“Is this an olive or a grape?” He wistfully ponders his platter, temporarily avoiding my question about his lack of nostalgia for the garage rock boom inaugurated by the Strokes' 2001 classic “Is This It.” “I'll be disappointed if it's a grape.” It is not a grape.

Several years back, the last avatar of downtown cool decamped for upstate New York, famously offering the quote, “I don't know how many white people having brunch I can deal with on a Saturday afternoon.” He's on the West Coast to rehearse and film videos with his band, the Voidz, whose equally enthralling and baffling sophomore album, “Virtue,” dropped in March. The band plays Chicago's Empty Bottle on June 15.

In the half-decade since the last Strokes full-length, the Voidz have become Casablancas's chief musical outlet. That much is clear — everything else about him remains open to runic interpretation.

Interviewing Casablancas is like trying to play chess against a drum machine or using a baseball glove to catch fish: It's clearly not his intended purpose. He's an upper-echelon lead singer, a seemingly kind and concerned person, but once the tape recorder is turned on, he becomes purposely inscrutable and profoundly awkward.

Once the grape-vs.-olive brouhaha is settled, he finishes his answer on nostalgia. Sort of.

“Um ... nostalgia,” he says deliberately, making it sound like a six-syllable word. He attempts to answer the question, which concerns his thoughts on the groundswell of romantic sentiment for the climax of guitar bands and indoor smoking, partially stirred up by the publication of last year's best-selling New York rock hagiography, “Meet Me in the Bathroom.”

“Yeah, I mean, life is weird. Sometimes you almost feel like, even something good itself, the enjoyment of it, other than y'know, food or sex, those, like, kind of, like, intense things, vacation ... those kind of, like, elongated experiences ... maybe concerts — maybe that's a bad example.” He pauses to recollect his thoughts about the rise of the Strokes.

“My point is, the buildup to it, these exciting things ... ‘We're gonna be doing this ... can't wait to do this; it's going to be exciting' — and then, afterward, when you're remembering, ‘Aw man, that was so good.' But sometimes, at the time, were you even enjoying it? I think the essence of life is kind of a nostalgia anticipation sandwich, or the present sandwiched on nostalgia.”

Cue nervous laughter and a nibble of lox.

Casablancas was the divinely ordained scion of Elite Modeling Agency impresario John Casablancas and Jeanette Christiansen, a former Miss Denmark. He went from a French lycee to a Swiss boarding repose, to the Upper West Side Dwight School. Success seemed like birthright.

A Velvet Underground CD spurred a revelation in the teenager raised on grunge. Lou Reed became an aspirational ideal, most audibly detected in his voice, a singularly distorted and crushed-glass baritone. What he lacked in range, Casablancas compensated for with a wearied, battered wavelength — a squinting cool, in the aloof and unruffled interpretation of the word.

“I just think he has soul,” offers Jeff Kite, Casablancas' longtime collaborator and the keyboardist in the Voidz.

After Casablancas rounded up four of his former classmates, dropped out and got a GED, the Strokes became the last band to instantiate a certain notion of New York: immaculate filth, lawless creativity and sepia myth.

The first two Strokes albums are unimpeachable if slightly interchangeable classics, but everything starts to unravel from there. Fame, touring and adherence to Jim Morrison's axioms inflamed substance abuse problems that imperiled Casablancas. Half of his Strokes bandmates got married and fled to Los Angeles. Guitarist Albert Hammond Jr., Casablancas's ex-roommate and closest friend, became embroiled with a grave drug problem.

The lead singer and principal composer got sober, married the band's co-manager, fathered two children and floated upstate. Having released only two full-lengths in the past dozen years, the Strokes are scattered across the country, semi-dormant but periodically reuniting.

This year, Casablancas will turn 40, putting him in those middle age years that often augur bizarre left turns in musicians. In the instance of Casablancas, he's undergone a philosophical revolution.

“I'm more interested in talking about philosophy and human politics, things that help,” he says. “But talking about the technical side of the music? I don't know if I'd want to read that kind of story, even if I loved the (artist).”

Casablancas retains a certain boyishness. He's unshaven, but his facial hair remains mostly tendrils. He wears a dark race car jacket, silver rings of tribal provenance, a beaded necklace and a thin metal chain. He's 6-foot-2 and sturdily built, with a bobbed cataract of hair swooshing forward.

The aesthetic coheres in the context of the Voidz, an eccentric, hirsute congregation of gifted second-act journeymen. “Virtue” swerves through garage rock, psychedelia, New Wave, hip-hop, hair metal and even Afro-pop. It's scattershot, but the high-water marks rank up there with the best songs he's written in a decade.

“I've always been interested in the struggle,” Casablancas says in answer to the question of when this intended shift toward higher consciousness began. “Um ... man's, you know, quest towards utopia. The end of needless man-made suffering.”

But apart from “New York City Cops” — a track dismissive of New York's finest that was famously cut from the American edition of “Is This It” in the immediate wake of the Sept. 11 attacks — it's difficult to point to anything explicitly political in the Strokes catalog. He cites Oliver Stone's “Untold History of the United States” as a book that hastened his awakening. Howard Zinn's “People's History of the United States,” too. Nor will a conversation with Casablancas go far without a reference to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whose autobiography has become his ideological north star.

What's more unclear is what Casablancas believes beyond the self-evident conclusions that King was brilliant and that corporations exert a disproportional influence on American life. When asked if he's been closely following the gun-control debate in the wake of the Parkland shooting, he answers enigmatically.

“I think it's not worth it,” he says. “It's not worth sending the earth down the toilet because of a moral stance on gun rights, do you know what I mean? I wish politicians were smarter.”

I ask him to elaborate.

“If anything, gun rights, I think, is a great magnifying glass for the whole symbolic problem,” he continues. “You know ... 90 percent of people — you've probably heard this — want some kind of basic gun, you know, gun regulations that, basically, the government doesn't vote for because of who the donors are. Basically, it's evidence that, you know, giving donations to a politician gives you more power than what 90 percent of people want.”

He says he loved President Barack Obama initially but indicts his refusal to take on the corporations. He inveighs against President Donald Trump as the most corporate president we've ever had. The Democratic National Committee's support of Hillary Clinton and “billion-dollar donations from Goldman Sachs” are similarly castigated.

As the conversation winds down, I change the subject to his own philosophy.

“The purpose of life is enjoyment, I suppose ... that's the one that comes to mind.”

Couldn't that be interpreted as selfish?

“I guess it depends on if, seeing other people suffer, you can be happy with that.”

The waitress brings the check. I ask a final question about how he'd like to be remembered.

“I don't know. I don't think about that. I honestly don't,” he retorts. “The thing about death is, the second you die, the entire universe joins you in death at that moment, because for you time is nothing and eventually everything is going to die. But I don't know. It's, like, weird, but I don't know. I know if you're very enlightened, death is not dark, but I'm still a pretty human-centric guy.”

We stand up to leave, and he asks me if I play soccer. I shake my head. As we near the door, we exchange goodbyes, and his publicist asks him how the interview went. He shrugs his shoulders.

“I have no idea,” he smirks. “I guess I'll find out at the next one.”