The Strokes – Reality Awaits Album Review: A Disjointed Return After Six Years
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As someone who has been immersed in indie rock for years—reviewing records from bands like American Football, Friko, and My New Band Believe—I’m always eager to dive into new guitar music. This week, I’m taking on the latest LP from the iconic New York rock band The Strokes, who have just returned with Reality Awaits.
To be completely upfront, I haven’t spent my life dissecting their entire back catalog. Being quite young, I often approach these legacy bands from a fresh perspective, and this record marks my very first impression of their music. A quick dive into their history shows why they carry such legendary status: as pioneers of the early-2000s garage rock and post-punk revival, their defining early run—Is This It, Room on Fire, and First Impressions of Earth—sent shockwaves through the genre, directly inspiring a generation of titan acts like Arctic Monkeys, The Killers, and Franz Ferdinand.
What makes them truly remarkable, though, is that they never quietly faded into nostalgia. Their 2020 release, The New Abnormal, earned sweeping critical acclaim and snagged a Grammy for Best Rock Album, proving their creative fire was still very much alive. Now, after a six-year hiatus from releasing new studio material, Julian Casablancas and company are back with Reality Awaits—a project specifically designed as an unusually playful, adventurous, and experimental entry in their catalog.
Now that we’ve set the stage, let’s get into the actual record. Coming into this as a completely fresh listener, I have to be blunt: Reality Awaits is neither a cohesive project nor a satisfying album experience compared to the countless incredible indie rock records I’ve sat with.
On paper, a tight nine-track runtime sounds like a recipe for a focused, filler-free statement, but the execution here falls drastically flat. Instead of a fluid journey, the tracklist feels sonically and vocally fractured, with individual cuts drifting past without any real connective tissue. To my ears, the album plays less like a unified release from The Strokes and more like a bizarre, mismatched mashup of American Football and Friko. You’ll have a restless banger anchored by sprawling ambient guitar work, only to be immediately followed by a track featuring childlike vocal delivery paired with bare-bones, minimalistic production. That jarring shift in atmosphere completely strips the record of a clear identity.
Earlier this year, I was blown away by the rich, nostalgic resonance of projects from Friko, My New Band Believe, and Aldous Harding. By contrast, all Reality Awaits delivered was boredom and a deeply uncomfortable, weird energy. It ended up being a downright frustrating and awful listening experience for me.
Production-wise, Reality Awaits suffers from a glaring identity crisis. It constantly stumbles between the band’s signature minimalist garage rock and a stripped-back pop aesthetic, never quite finding a cohesive rhythm. While the Rick Rubin treatment supplies a clean, spacious studio environment, the band feels hopelessly caught between two contrasting lanes—incapable of fully committing to either.
The most bizarre paradox of the record lies in the contradiction between its setting and its final execution. The Strokes reportedly decamped to Costa Rica to recapture the claustrophobic tightness of their early Manhattan roots. On cuts like “Dine N’ Dash,” you can momentarily catch a glimpse of that restless, urban garage-pop swagger. However, any attempt to ground the record in that classic grit is completely undermined by the decision to heavy-handedly layer Auto-Tune and jarring vocal effects across the project.
This issue becomes painfully obvious on tracks like “Liar’s Remorse” and “Going to Babble On,” where Julian Casablancas’ vocals are buried beneath dense layers of artificial texturing, resulting in a delivery that feels undeniably grating. Let’s be completely unfiltered: the foundational DNA of indie rock relies on guitar-driven production anchored by raw, authentic vocal performances. By injecting heavy Auto-Tune into this framework, the band didn’t just take a playful detour; they committed a fundamental betrayal of the genre’s core appeal. Trading raw garage energy for processed pop-minimalism leaves the production feeling overengineered and coasting on brand recognition alone.
Songwriting-wise, Reality Awaits actually holds its own with some surprisingly solid penmanship. I won’t find much to blame here. Tracks like “Psycho Shit” are clear standouts, showcasing Julian Casablancas’s “deranged humor” and a “comic edge” that makes the record highly clippable and quote-worthy for today’s digital discourse. It’s a “slightly deranged style record” that perfectly targets a Gen Z audience that rewards “weirdness” and “memeability”. The album dives into heavy themes like self-mythologizing, reconciling precision, and modern legibility—treating pop structure as a “playground, not a cage”. To be honest, these are the kinds of complicated philosophies that are utterly beyond my knowledge, so I can’t exactly knock them for trying to stay “legible” in a genre-blurred era. It’s less of a “tight rock confessional” and more of a “wry, mutated Strokes universe” where the writing actually works.
Moving into the tracklist, the album opens with “Psycho Shit.” While it doesn’t function as a traditional, high-octane intro, it quickly stands out as one of the record’s highlights. It features genuinely strong songwriting alongside an emotionally charged, raw vocal performance from Casablancas that feels refreshingly authentic. That momentum carries directly into “Dine N’ Dash,” easily the best track on the entire project and a consensus favorite among listeners. It delivers a fast-paced shot of garage-pop energy powered by a restless, infectious vocal display, giving the album a remarkably solid starting run.
Unfortunately, that promise evaporates immediately with “Lonely in the Future” and “Falling Out of Love.” These two cuts pivot awkwardly toward an empty, pop-minimalist sound that comes off as completely uninspired, boring, and fundamentally misplaced. “Going to Babble On” temporarily reignites that classic garage rock spark, but it ultimately serves as the record’s final redeeming moment.
The remaining stretch—comprising “Going Shopping,” “Liar’s Remorse,” “The Fruits of Conquest,” and “Tyrants of the Mellow Moon”—slumps into a mid-tempo, slow-burning crawl. Rather than offering compelling atmosphere, these last four tracks feel thoroughly dull and lifeless, completely draining whatever distinct identity Reality Awaits had left to offer.
Ultimately, Reality Awaits stands as a deeply frustrating, scattered entry from a band capable of so much more. While Julian Casablancas’ pen remains sharp—delivering plenty of deranged humor, memeable wit, and quote-worthy moments tailored for the modern digital era—the album’s structural and sonic execution completely undermines its songwriting strengths. A solid opening run with tracks like “Psycho Shit” and “Dine N’ Dash” offers a brief glimpse of brilliant garage-pop energy, but those moments are quickly swallowed by dull, mid-tempo slumps and a jarring overuse of vocal processing that betrays the core appeal of indie rock.
Instead of a bold, playful evolution, Reality Awaits comes across as an overengineered experiment caught in a perpetual identity crisis—neither fully committing to raw, guitar-driven energy nor finding a satisfying home in minimalist pop. For a legacy band returning after a six-year hiatus, it feels less like a triumph and more like a disjointed slog that coasts on reputation rather than substance.
[Rating: 4/10]
- Favorite Tracks: Psycho Shit, Dine N’ Dash
- Least Favorite Tracks: Lonely in the Future, Falling out of Love, Liars’ Remorse
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