The Strokes’ stock is pretty high in 2026, definitely higher than it was in 2016, and maybe even 2006. This year marks the 25th anniversary of their classic debut, Is This It? Their recent tour, the band’s first in 20 years, saw them light up a multigenerational audience of young olds and old youngs. Their standing isn’t only based on nostalgia either: Though the last Strokes album, 2020’s The New Abnormal, got a little lost in the Covid malaise, its standout hit, “The Adults Are Talking,” has as many Spotify streams as “Last Nite.” Meanwhile, the biggest indie band around, Geese, is undeniably post-post-Strokes, even if the band members were still in their strollers back when Julian, Albert, Fab, Nick, and Nikolai owned the night. Not a bad legacy to keep rolling into your second quarter century.
Millions of people would love some good new Strokes bangers (“Can Julian Casablancas and the Strokes Really Save Rock & Roll?” wonders a recent headline in The Irish Times). Listening to their seventh record, one gets the sense that the band itself is only theoretically engaged by that specific proposition. Reality Awaits is an at times enjoyable, often inscrutable, sometimes straight-up bizarre addition to the band’s story.
Casablancas, a committed and active lefty, has some stuff to say about the state of the world, and though his commentary isn’t always super coherent, that doesn’t really matter when it’s impacted into top-shelf Strokes-core. On “Going Shopping,” drummer Fab Moretti bounces along with clipped precision as guitarists Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. unspool some nifty Television-in-a-teapot interplay, and Casablancas kicks political complaints like “Solidarity can be difficult when you’ve got cool stuff to lose” and “We’re building castles from the bones of dead trees.” The character in the song wants to leave the city and escape to the country, but then he gets bored and goes back.
It’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect the guy from “Meet Me in the Bathroom” to be singing about as he enters his late forties — and despite (and maybe because of) head-scratching admissions such as “I want to be a seven-foot starfish,” it hits. “Going to Babble On” is another gem: Julian begs and pouts about the velocity of modern life over the neo-New Wave this band does just about as well as anyone in human history, culminating into a spiraling, spandex guitar solo that’s straight Eighties fire. “Lonely in the Future,” which opens with a scuzzy hard-rock riff, is an aging cool kid’s been-there-done-that swipe at today’s totally-online generation. (The lyrics cast a skeptical eye towards adherents of political commentator Chris Hedges and online music reviewer Anthony Fantano.) Remarkably, the song itself is catchy enough that this all goes by in a speedy jumble, like it could be just one more cute little rocker about chasing girls and staying up all night.
Elsewhere, Casablancas’ myriad indulgences and idiosyncrasies bog things down, often seeming as if he’s trying to link up the Strokes with the abstruse art-pop he makes in his other band, the Voidz. On the album opening “Psycho Shit,” he sings about predatory violence with obvious overtones of the war in Gaza, and corporate imperialism in general, as the song meanders and grinds toward its diffuse combustion. On the resolutely sucky “Liar’s Remorse,” his voice takes on a Caribbean lilt as he sings an emulsified swing ballad — after a solo on what sounds like a trumpet played through an effects pedal, he inexplicably implores “Harmonic minor!”
These surprising little vocal flourishes come up in other places — in “Falling Out of Love,” he low talks like Leonard Cohen, and over the Cure/New Order guitars of the otherwise loverly “Dine And Dash,” he puts on an English accent that kind of sounds like Christopher Guest in Spinal Tap. Throughout, the use of vocal processing is heavy, which becomes especially grating on the album’s slower songs, upending what might’ve been a dreamy, distracted elegance. “The Fruits of Conquest” has a good open-shirted Stones slither, but his disco-Dracula slapstick pretty much destroys it.
On The New Abnormal, the band wandered into some similarly loopy musical cul de sacs, but that album also had moments like “Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus” and “Ode to the Mets,” surreal, sidelong estimations of their status as New York rock icons, giving the whole thing a long-strange-trip relatability. This record’s less musically grabby moments feel more insular and ostentatious in their weirdness. At only nine songs, Reality Awaits feels longer than it ought to. It climaxes with the moody epic “Tyrants of the Mellow Moon,” capped by a big laser-prog guitar solo. The song offers an oblong echo of the desultory wooziness that used to evoke leatherjacket ragamuffins collapsing into a cab together on the way to the next bar. You can’t stay that way forever, and it’s good to try not to. But this feels a little more like falling off the edge of reality itself.
Cheery Viruet*
Cheery Viruet
