STROKES - Reality Awaits

It speaks volumes about today's music discourse that most of the chatter around the new album by a band like the Strokes — a band closing in on thirty years of activity and one that shaped the rock imagination of the new millennium — boils down to Julian Casablancas' heavy use of autotune. Apparently it's more pressing to reaffirm that the audio processor is the root of all evil than to actually dwell on the new songs of a band that, six years ago, with “The New Abnormal”, proved they could reinvent themselves and perhaps kick off a new phase.
Well, it has to be said right away: the New Yorkers have decided to abandon that path, the one that in 2020 turned their proverbial indie formula into a “gorgeous forty-something.”

“Reality Awaits”, in truth, doesn't seem to want to follow any particular course. It's a messy, chaotic record, one that starts one way and ends another, throwing in a couple more directions along the way.
It opens with “Psycho Shit”, a vaguely psychedelic track, with guitars heating up as the minutes pass and Casablancas delivering an unusually political tirade for him. On the cathartic ending, Julian cryptically takes aim at everything: wars, capitalism, dehumanization.
After a finale as fiery as “Psycho Shit”'s, the midtempo “Dine N' Dash” feels almost like an anticlimax; then again, it steers the lyrics toward a more melancholic, inward-looking dimension, and toward “Lonely In The Future”. The latter is the track on the record closest to the nu-garage of their early days; still, it's more memorable for its spiteful dissing of Fantano than for musical reasons.

“Going To Babble On” and “Going Shopping”, on the other hand, come across as an infectiously feel good centerpiece of the record, and musically speaking, they're the only two tracks that would have fit and made sense on the band's superb previous album.
But let's get to the autotune too, an essential element of the record and, above all, of its final section. Like any tool, if used as a constituent and essential part of a stylistic signature, it can be necessary. Otherwise, it's superfluous. On “Reality Awaits” the processor is everywhere; sometimes it works, sometimes less so. It turns, for instance, “Falling Out Of Love” into one of the band's most languid and successful romantic ballads, with Casablancas, amid flourishes of lunar guitar, singing a serenade with the voice of a lovestruck little robot running on dying batteries. But above all, it gives the closing “The Fruits Of Conquest” and “Tyrants Of The Mellow Moon” an irresistible retro-futuristic mood that closely recalls the immortal “Instant Crush” by Daft Punk (with Casablancas on vocals).

“Reality Awaits” isn't a record we'll remember among the band's best, nor as the vessel for some hit destined for every future concert setlist. The Strokes' seventh album is an experiment, a devil-may-care act of creative freedom. A labyrinth leading nowhere, hard to decipher, full of surprises, a few missteps, and a few dazzling glimpses.

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30/07/2026