Full of Auto-Tuned vocals and incisive lyrics, the rock band’s seventh album is doomy, strange, and fully in on the bit.
In 1986, Paul Simon was 22 years into his career when he released “You Can Call Me Al” as the first single from his seventh solo album, Graceland. The music video was the brainchild of Simon’s friend Lorne Michaels, positioning Simon as the straight man to Chevy Chase, more than a foot taller than Simon and stealing all of his lip-syncing duties. Forty years later, Julian Casablancas is a quarter-century into his career leading the Strokes, whose seventh LP, Reality Awaits, was promoted by the music video for the delightfully chintzy single “Going Shopping,” featuring Walton Goggins playing Chevy to Julian’s Paul. There are plenty of Easter egg-style nods to the original video—fitting for two songs about the midlife alienation of lifelong New Yorkers. In “You Can Call Me Al,” an unmoored, 44-year-old Simon laments his middle-aged schlubbiness before recapturing his mojo on a trip to the “third world,” while the 47-year-old Casablancas admits, “I’m an old man now,” and decamps the hyper-commodified city for a trip to the sticks.
But unlike Simon’s worldbeat epiphany, there’s no discovery awaiting Julian in the country: in no time, he’s back home and happily shopping. “I’m at the mall, and the song is bumpin’,” he warbles, sounding less like Simon than 42-year-old Long Islander Lou Reed, hopping on his Kawasaki GPZ and heading out to the middle of nowhere on 1984’s “New Sensations.” There were no spiritual revelations for Reed either, just the kind of numb energy earned from what Douglas Coupland called “historical slumming” in the book which lent its name to Casablancas’ generation. While Reed just wanted to play with his joystick, Casablancas and company conclude the “Shopping” video with the band, Goggins, an Uber Eats delivery driver, and a couple of clowns happily dancing together and taking a bow, before being mowed down by off-screen gunfire as we fade to black.
As a critique of how capitalism euphemizes its violence with ersatz collectivity, the “Shopping” ending is pretty on-the-nose. It makes more sense once you hear Reality Awaits’ opener “Psycho Shit,” an early-’80s Ozzy-style slow burn about an unnamed evil force killing its prey from behind a desk. It sounds like a digital exorcism—and like nothing that’s ever been on a previous Strokes album—not least because, as on “Shopping” and much of the album, Casablancas coats his vocals with Auto-Tune. If you can’t stand expressionist experiments with pitch correction, you’re definitely not going to like Reality Awaits, on which Casablancas lets the Voidz’s bitchin’ ’80s sensibilities breach the Strokes’ castle walls more than ever. But at least he’s consistent: While Auto-Tune certainly hits the ear differently than the distressed-denim vocal distortion of the Strokes’ epochal first two albums, both are distancing mechanisms. If not blinking red lights signaling “alienation,” they’re at least an acknowledgement from the singer that the world around him doesn't produce any bombshells, just processed, garbled sensations.
Lately, Casablancas has been trying hard to be heard, but he’s incapable of expressing a political opinion without ironic padding. Anyone expecting a Rage Against the Machine turn after the Strokes’ anti-imperialist 2026 Coachella performance of “Oblivius” should recall that Casablancas joked to some Oxford students a couple months later that he thought the bold agitprop stage design would be “a treat that influencers would really appreciate.” And Casablancas’ viral “Subway Takes” assertion that “American Zionists get the benefits of white privileged people but talk like they are Black people during slavery” came only after he excoriated voice memos and modern cars. Deeply aware of the inseparability of medium and the message, Casablancas rues the internet’s flattening effect on communication while encouraging you to Use This Sound. Reality Awaits sits inside that tension, fully aware of the bit, both sonically and lyrically. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it results in the Strokes’ loosest, funniest, and best album since before Facebook launched—which, sure, given the wildly varying quality of the band’s last four albums, feels like damning with faint praise. But it’s also a welcome acknowledgement that the Strokes finally seem comfortable dovetailing their festival-headlining elder-statesmen status with Casablancas’ desire to meet the techno-political moment on his terms.
Casablancas’ tongue-in-cheek radicalism resonates with Gen Z, who are increasingly intolerant of U.S. imperialism—and who generated a fresh era for the band by meming the anti-authoritarian lockdown-era single “The Adults Are Talking” into the Strokes’ most-streamed song. The band elaborates their new shtick on “The Fruits of Conquest,” the first half of which is slinky and confident, sounding like the Strokes’ early 2000s contemporaries Spoon, with Casablancas growling, “They don’t obey, so we won’t obey.” Then, as the second half grows darker and more self-effacing, he moans “I’m a leech,” over and over, letting his trademark self-doubt overwhelm the song for a minute. Close your eyes and it’s easy to imagine a sea of festival attendees who were born after First Impressions of Earth chanting both phrases with equal fervor, or constructing new TikTok rabbit warrens out of them. Grotesque impulses pervade the album, like how on “Dine N’Dash” he worms his way toward Idiot-era Iggy Pop loucheness, “Liar’s Remorse” stretches romantic repentance into psychedelic territory, and “Tyrants of the Mellow Moon,” with Casablancas in sad-robot Roy Rogers mode, is the album’s best evocation of its deconstructed cigarette ad cover art.
But of course, the Strokes can only experiment so much: Though Casablancas would prefer to minimize this fact, they’re as much a reliable brand as a band, having taken full ownership of a sound that, ironically, itself once felt like an uncanny synthesis of the 1976-1982 dance/punk moment. So hearing slight variations on their sonic signature in 2026—tight guitar harmonizing, quick downstrumming, a disco band’s rhythm section, Casablancas’ arty hangdog moue—can feel like the Strokes covering the Strokes. On Reality, “Going to Babble On” and especially “Lonely in the Future” are the umpteenth updates on the band’s Mk 1 coke-bump new wave. “Future” is the clearest candidate for viral circulation on the album, Casablancas rummaging through pop culture references like Ezra Koenig, namedropping the liberal U.S. foreign policy critic Chris Hedges, confusing Josh Groban and John Legend, and licking shots at YouTube music critic Anthony Fantano (who’s already responded). Over the glammy power-pop of “Babble,” the admonition “Don’t ever do what they say” feels aimed as much at his record industry bosses as the global power bloc. Either way, his stylish exhaustion reveals itself each time he croons that he’s “starting again.”
I’m likely reading too much into Nick Valensi stepping aside for the band’s forthcoming tour and Casablancas mentioning band tensions in interviews, but the line “here we are, for the final time” from the album-ending “Tyrants” feels like the band threatening to pack it in. (Granted, they’ve been trying and failing to do this since Is This It.) Is the title, Reality Awaits, a signal that the Strokes are anticipating a future that isn’t lived through the scrim of a famous rock band? A better interpretation, given that the band has shifted from 1967 Lou Reed to 1984 Lou Reed—and are as popular with Zoomers as their parents—is that while the Strokes are still stylish and cool, they’ve never been “real.” When they blew up, as MTV and glossy music mags were giving way to the internet and reality TV, Spin named them “Band of the Year,” not because they strove toward ragged rock authenticity, but because they’d mastered the pose: a band who acts like “they’re portraying themselves in an HBO series about a twentysomething, rich-kid punk band whose members drink too much and like to kiss one another.” A quarter-century hence, with the world far more visible and far less knowable, Reality Awaits is both serious and weird, catchy and doomy, the sound of five guys in their 40s being TikTok rock stars while the world burns.
