The Strokes – Reality Awaits
Is This It turned twenty-five this year. The Strokes have now spent longer being the band who made that record than the time it took them to make it, which is either a testament to its durability or a millstone, depending on your vantage point. Reality Awaits, their seventh album and first in six years, makes clear they’ve stopped caring which. Recorded with Rick Rubin in Costa Rica, it is strange, sprawling and frequently thrilling — a record that has no interest whatsoever in meeting expectations it considers beneath it.
Opener “Psycho Shit” announces the territory immediately: ominous arpeggios, ethereal swells and a heavily processed Julian Casablancas guiding a five-minute slow build that sounds nothing like anything in their back catalogue. The Auto-Tune is divisive — it has divided critics fairly evenly — but in context it functions less as an affectation and more as distance, a way of making the familiar voice strange again. “Going Shopping” is more immediately gratifying, Fab Moretti’s clipped drumming anchoring a Television-inflected guitar exchange between Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. while Casablancas muses drily on consumerism and the difficulty of solidarity when you have nice things to protect.
The album is at its best in the middle. “Going to Babble On,” partly debuted in demo form back in 2021 during the New York mayoral race, channels political disillusionment into the band’s most direct and accessible track here. “Lonely in the Future” opens with a bass-and-drums moment that strays into Queens of the Stone Age territory before settling into something woozy and reflective. “Fruits of Conquest” deploys hand drums and a tropical looseness that shouldn’t work and mostly does.
Where the record loses ground is in its longer, more indulgent passages. At nine songs it still feels like it could be tightened, and closer “Tyrants of the Mellow Moon” — a moody prog-adjacent epic capped by a laser-guided guitar solo — trails off rather than lands. The ambition is genuine, but the edit is missing.
Still, a Strokes record that takes real risks and lands more than it misses is worth considerably more than a safe one. Twenty-five years on from Is This It, they remain more interesting than the legend requires them to be. That counts for something.
