‘Is This It’ must feel like a double-edged sword to The Strokes. Their lauded debut album earned them widespread acclaim and shot them to the top of festival bills and onto the covers of magazines around the world. It is also still the yardstick by which the rest of their discography has been judged by the general public, a barometer that holds little regard for evolution or growth.

The Strokes haven’t been the band that made that first record a long time ago. That’s no bad thing – if they’d stayed in the same place creatively, we wouldn’t have ‘Ode To The Mets’, the curious, creeping finale of 2020’s ‘The New Abnormal’, or ‘Drag Queen’, the gloomy new wave juggernaut from 2016 EP ‘Future Present Past’. On ‘Reality Awaits’, their seventh album, recorded in Costa Rica with Rick Rubin, we’re given plenty more treats that wouldn’t exist if the five-piece had let themselves stand still and please the crowd.

Case in point: 25 years ago, would you have expected to hear an instrumental break in a Strokes song manipulated to sound like brass? Probably not. Yet, on the shadowy ‘Liar’s Remorse’, that’s where we find ourselves – bursts of guitar distorted into trumpet-like sounds via pedals, sandwiched between staccato riffs and sustained synth chords, and a retro video game music ending. ‘Lonely In The Future’ opens with a brief, rollicking bass-and-drums moment from Nikolai Fraiture and Fab Moretti that feels more akin to something you’d hear on a Queens Of The Stone Age record, while ‘Going To Babble On’ – the album’s most immediate cut – features a noodling guitar solo that sounds pulled straight from an ’80s rock epic.

In recent years, a narrative has been perpetuated that Julian Casablancas is only still working with The Strokes for financial reasons – a line of thinking that hasn’t been helped by past comments he’s made. But here, he sounds more engaged and with his head in the game than ever. At its core, ‘Reality Awaits’ is an incredibly playful record, both musically and in how the frontman utilises his voice. There are falsetto shifts and lines that are rasped, baritone croons and, yes, plenty of his beloved, divisive Auto-Tune. At points, things become more theatrical, like when he intones “Mostly found an angle, holding on for now” on ‘Falling Out Of Love’.

Lyrically, ‘Reality Awaits’ feels split between the personal and the political – sometimes both tussling for attention in the same song, as on the Voidz-y opener ‘Psycho Shit’. Often, Casablancas’ words feel impenetrable – not helped by those slatherings of vocal effects – but when the barriers crack even a little, they’re invigorating. Lead single ‘Going Shopping’ tackles late-stage capitalism and our habit of destroying our planet to churn out products that aren’t built to last (“We’ve been expanding on our greatness / Building future ruins / We’re building castles from the bones of dead trees / Moulded from the shattered ashes of the Dead Sea”). ‘Going To Babble On’, first debuted in demo form in a 2021 video supporting New York’s then-mayoral candidate Maya Wiley, taps into political disillusionment before encouraging people to get engaged (“Maybe it’s time that you see for yourself for once / Doesn’t anybody wanna know what’s going on?”), while ‘The Fruits Of Conquest’ depicts a reality in which “they don’t obey so we won’t obey”.

Humour perpetuates ‘Lonely In The Future’, a song seemingly about always having been ahead of the curve. It’s an idea that Casablancas nodded to in an interview with NME in 2024, suggesting that boundary-pushing music being accepted by the mainstream can “take a long time, and I’ve always just tried to put my head down and make things that are good”. “Weeknd, I like your outfit / YOLO, you only live once / Dude kept the beat ‘As It Was’ / John Legend, that’s Josh Groban,” he sings in one Harry Styles-referencing verse, later putting the boot into music journalism’s self-proclaimed figurehead Anthony Fantano with the cutting advice: “Stick to the technical ‘cause that’s great / But you would not recognise art in any age”.

Whether unleashing disses or getting deep into the weird and wonderful, a quarter of a century on from their debut, The Strokes sound more alive and locked in than they have in years. While ‘Reality Awaits’ does have its more dud moments – the opening one-two of ‘Psycho Shit’ and Dine N’Dash’ are a little meandering, while closer ‘Tyrants On The Mellow Moon’ similarly lacks the desired impact – it’s proof that letting bands go in unexpected directions can pay off big time.

Details

  • Record label: RCA Records
  • Release date: July 26, 2026

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