The Strokes' Julian Casablancas and Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O explore music outside their comfort zones

Musicians come to Coachella for all kinds of reasons: to hype fresh work, unveil an anticipated reunion, collect a fat fee. But not many use the annual music and arts festival in Indio, California, to turn off their audience, as Julian Casablancas of The Strokes seemed eager to do at this year's edition.

Prowling the stage of the Mojave tent backed by his side project, a startling new band called The Voidz, the singer known for his indolent croon growled menacingly in songs that layered slashing guitars over breakneck digital-punk beats. His lyrics, although hard to make out, projected a sneering disgust at odds with the dishevelled glamour embodied in Strokes tunes such as Last Nite and Barely Legal.

Willfully harsh, the show seemed designed to repel those expecting something sweetly Strokes-like - which after 15 minutes or so was what it did, leading Casablancas to declare, "This music was meant to alienate the right people", as fans filed out of the Mojave.

"Yeah, I got a lot of grief for that," the frontman said with a laugh recently when reminded of the performance in April. Yet neither the grief nor the Coachella crowd's reaction deterred him. Last week, Julian Casablancas + The Voidz (as they are officially billed) released Tyranny, a bracing debut album full of soured political invective inspired by what he referred to as "all the insanity going on in America": for him, that's corporate greed, police-state overreach and destruction of the environment.

Melodic but often brutally textured - and with knotty structures that stretch one song, Human Sadness, to nearly 11 minutes - the music sets aside the tidy songcraft that made The Strokes poster boys of the garage-rock revival that swept New York in the early 2000s. And Casablancas isn't the only one moving on from those days.