Reality is confusing. Life is confusing. You have to balance work with school with family with friends any given week, and at least one of those will always surprise you. Some new problem comes up at work that really isn’t within your pay grade, but someone screwed up so now it’s yours. Someone cancels plans to hang out last minute for reasons you didn’t even know could be used as an excuse. Some assignment comes up for your 1 credit class that really doesn’t seem worth the effort but is also due tomorrow. Reality doesn’t always make perfect sense. If Reality Awaits was trying to mimic that, it did a perfect job. If not, we have issues to talk about. On July 24th, 2026, famed indie rock band The Strokes released their long-awaited album Reality Awaits after 6 years. Was it worth the hype? Did it follow up on the promise shown by their critical comeback The New Abnormal? Let’s see.
First, I want to go into the sound of Reality Awaits. To take you back to the pandemic era really quick (I’m sorry), The Strokes’ previous album, The New Abnormal, took a lot of inspiration from new wave and ‘80s synthpop. Though many of their 2010s albums also did, The New Abnormal really followed through on this inspiration and more fully incorporated an ‘80s aesthetic. On Reality Awaits, that aesthetic is only there in part. The phantom of the ‘80s looms over the album faintly, and it can be heard in the full, colorful-sounding guitars and occasional backing synths. With this softer sound, I am reminded how far we are from the band’s early garage rock days. The instrumentation does little to grab one’s attention aside from the guitar solos, which works well on some songs but creates a somewhat bland sound on others. The instrumentals for “Falling out of Love” and “The Fruits of Conquest,” for example, can become repetitive and one-note over their longer runtimes. On the other hand, the mellow synths and guitar riffs on “Dine N’Dash” and “Liar’s Remorse” create a subtle but powerful atmosphere, and the bubbly and infectious chords on “Going Shopping” really add to the sense of wonder and discovery expressed in frontman Julian Casablancas’ lyrics. This type of instrumentation, essentially, brings mixed results for the band overall.
Speaking of Casablancas, let’s address the elephant in the room. The elephant stares back at you. It slowly lifts up its trunk and lets out a screech that automatically pitches itself down. It’s time to talk about the autotune. On many songs on Reality Awaits, Casablancas sings in autotune, which is new for The Strokes. His melodies often sound very unpolished and unstable, as notes quickly pitch shift and crash into other notes. I have mixed feelings on this, though I get the impression many Strokes fans lean towards the negative. On the singles “Falling out of Love” and “Going Shopping,” the autotune adds a unique quality that sticks out and, in my opinion, makes his singing more heartfelt on the former and catchier on the latter. Ironically, the autotune can make him sound more flawed and human at times. However, on deep cuts like “Psycho Shit” and “Tyrants of the Mellow Moon,” he sounds unnatural in a way that distracts from the power of the song. His ugly and screeching falsetto on “Psycho Shit” absolutely does not help. Again, like the instrumentals, it’s an experiment yielding mixed results, which is pretty much the theme of this article as I’m realizing now. Let’s see if the lyrics are any better.
I want to go into the general concept of Reality Awaits - and why I’m not completely sure there is one. To begin my confusion, many lyrics deal with themes of isolation and themes of adventure that do not fully connect to one another. “Dine N’Dash” and “Falling out of Love” bring back memories of a bygone relationship and “Liar’s Remorse” is told from the perspective of a lonely man struggling to find love. At the same time, “Going to Babble On” and “Going Shopping” talk of starting life from scratch and moving forward with a new perspective, perhaps as a result of this loneliness. I think there’s relevancy in stories like these, when technology is overtaking people’s lives and making genuine human connection more difficult than it has been. I like what many of these songs are doing individually, but most of them fail to really tie themselves together as an album experience. The adventurous and isolated parts of the record are mixed between one another and don’t often connect, and the track “Lonely In the Future” deviates even further from the focus of the record, as Casablancas essentially takes the song’s runtime to throw jabs at artists whom they have influenced and to lay their claim as innovators. With its lazy attempts at throwing shade, like “Weeknd, I like your outfit” and “Dude kept the beat ‘As It Was,’” the song feels too lacking to be meaningful criticism but too direct to be ignored as well. It’s a step down in lyricism that doesn’t fit thematically even when it tries to tie in the idea of being “lonely in the future,” and it’s a good example of the album’s disjointed concept.
Casablancas has always written his lyrics vaguely, and oftentimes that’s part of his appeal. There’s enough in his lyrics to decipher an environment or an emotion that he’s getting at, and sometimes that paradoxically makes him even more relatable. I noticed his lyricism became more direct on The New Abnormal, while on Reality Awaits the pendulum has swung back. Until the end of the record, I did not mind this change in style (“Lonely in the Future” also suffers from being too direct if anything), but the last couple of tracks leave me confused as to what they are meant to convey. Call me unqualified if you want; I don’t know what the hell Julian is singing about. “Tyrants of the Mellow Moon” pretty much just says “Farewell. This is the end of the record,” and “The Fruits of Conquest” contains vague lyrics about not “obeying” and an entire portion where Casablancas repeats “I’m a leech” over and over. The lyrics on these couple tracks are too vague and abstract themselves into nothing until any social or political commentary is either too vague or too little too late.
I feel like I’ve sounded negative on this album so far, but I want to be clear that I still enjoyed most of the individual tracks on this album. Perhaps that’s because I’m already a fan of The Strokes’ sound, but a lot of songs were enjoyable for the same reason most Strokes songs are. “Falling Out of Love,” “Dine N’Dash,” and “Liar’s Remorse” are good ballads that combine quality songwriting with emotive vocals, even if they are all a bit too long. “Going to Babble On” and “Going Shopping” sound legitimately exciting and captivating, with more hidden but well established emotional cores. These are all moments where the album succeeded and kept my engagement, and the rest of the album is still listenable, but it has issues I did not expect going into it. I see Reality Awaits as an album that works to experiment and try different things, and each of these, from the autotune to the instrumentation to the lyrics, fail almost as much as they succeed. I can respect the endeavor to try something new (I personally love when artists experiment), but a more fleshed out and dynamic concept as well as stronger lyrics could have made everything click more than it actually did. That’s weird to say about an album with a 6 year wait behind it, but those are my thoughts. Please check out the album on your own if you haven’t yet, and perhaps you’ll see something where I didn’t. In the meantime, I’ll wait and hope for The Strokes to rebound on their next album (though that won’t come out this decade, let’s be honest).
