The Strokes
Reality Awaits
RCA/CULT
Six years after releasing The New Abnormal, The Strokes returned earlier this year with an unexpectedly controversial headlining set at Coachella and an uncharacteristically political album in tow. The influential garage rockers have never minced words outside of their music or within it, so maybe it’s only natural that the band has wandered in this direction. With Reality Awaits, the group has done something largely antithetical to the aughts garage-rock revival scene they were born within and helped to shape: they tap into the political zeitgeist with references to Chris Hedges, AI mindlessness, and exploitative Amazon practices. The group has defiantly moved on from their sardonic, apathetical style in favor of a synthy era that lands somewhere between Lou Reed and Rage Against the Machine.
While still sounding like a Strokes record, Reality Awaits displays how Julian Casablancas has grown since the band’s last LP in 2020, bringing to mind Steve McQueen circa Enemy of the People. It’s an ambitious album that combines the more experimental qualities of Casablancas’s side project The Voidz with the pop-rock sensibilities The Strokes have always relied on. Reality Awaits isn’t a forget-your-problems dance record, though; it’s confrontational, even if that comes at a cost. Gone are the dulcet, subtle qualities of The New Abnormal, and although there are flashes of the old Strokes heard here, the wiser, more mature iteration of the band hits harder: “We learned to harvest bombs from lead, we learn to die to learn to live,” Casablancas sings on opener “Psycho Shit,” while behind him Albert Hammond Jr. nails a guitar solo that sounds like a riff on “Hotel California.”
On “Dine N’Dash,” “Lonely in the Future,” and “Going to Babble On” we get a bit more of the classic Strokes sound: rhythmic, catchy, melodic. Shots are fired at the internet’s most controversial music nerd, but the lines that hit hardest are also the headiest ones, such as a lyric about projection versus reality: “Mistook the words of a wise man who once said, ‘The birds of a feather die together.’” It may not be their strongest record, but on a passive first listen you might miss the nuance Reality Awaits offers. It’s perhaps The Strokes’ most interesting record lyrically and an ambitious addition to their oeuvre.
