The Strokes – Reality Awaits Review

Those gripping their Reality Awaits tickets tightly may loosen them after hearing The Strokes’ latest work. Reliant on autotune to the point of obscuring crucial and timely messages and then delayed by a month, the lead-up to Reality Awaits was a reality check for the Julian Casablancas-fronted band. Mocking theories that Casablancas had written an album so poor people would stop asking for The Strokes to reform in future made its way online. Never a good sign that even dedicated fans believe this is a joke to prevent future tours. But the Reality Awaits tour is dependent on the hits of the past, those glory days from Is This It and First Impressions of Earth. Two of the nine Reality Awaits songs can already be written off. Going Shopping and Falling Out of Love were uneventful at best. A generous read for the two of those songs, ripped through and ruined by tech-adjacent tools Casablancas is seemingly obsessed with to the point of concerning dedication. It affects the band, the album, and the listening experience, and not at all positively.  

Yet there is still hope. The opening bars of Psycho Shit manage to inspire some instrumental breathing room for the band. Echoing and quiet guitar work, paired with a slight tinge of wonder from those strings. It’s a touch plodding but sets the scene for commentary the band proved themselves capable of during their Coachella set. We are nowhere close to that now. Psycho Shit is decent. It would be better without this constant vocal disorder Casablancas is obsessed with. Only songs will define him, he cries. There’ll be more to define him after Reality Awaits, and none of it good. The trouble here is the risk of obscuring some magic moment, which Casablancas does do on the instrumentally thrilling and charged opening track. But he also hides away some sluggish, unconvincing commentaries on the world around him. Be it My Chemical Romance with The Black Parade or Pulp with returns to their classic material on stage, big bands can find ways into the modern discourse with old works. The Strokes did that and failed to impress with Reality Awaits.  

This is rehashing a lot of what listeners will already know and love about the band, just without the warmth or depth expected of The Strokes. Hardly the most seamless of transitions into Dine N’Dash, a song which identifies and outlines the rest of the album’s structure. A few instrumentals of interest before Casablancas wades in with a relatively poor attempt at adapting the band into what he perceives as the next steps of music. He’s missed the mark before but at least sounded connected with the audience, both challenging and comforting their perspective of the group’s work. Not so here. Casablancas dials down this autotune obsession for songs that would, frankly, sound better if his writing was obscured. There’s attempts at having segues between songs, and it falls flat. It works in isolation for Dine N’Dash into Lonely in the Future, though you’ve got to put up with Casablancas noting whatever “minimum soft” is as a direction for the band.  

Casablancas is an exceptional writer most of the time, but this appears to be a compilation of scraps. Nothing here feels like either strong commentary on the cultural scene around them or even a revamp of what they had already put out before. The Strokes stagger this horrendously awkward middle ground between trying to innovate and maintain their current image. Fans of Better Call Saul will be delighted by the first guitar riff of Falling Out of Love, though short-changed with the follow-up notes. For an album promising that the real world lies out a little further on than we are now, Casablancas sounds too scared to confront it. Producer Rick Rubin does very little for the band. His desire to seek out music through the feeling alone fails him here. It’s a lot of plodding similarities from a band whose sound works best when they’re challenging the norms of the genre. Casablancas seems to believe he can hit the heartfelt high notes while throwing his voice through a croaking vocoder.  

He loses not just the essence of the song with that, but seems stubborn in changing that and passes over the chance to connect with a listener that little bit more. He did it so well on The New Abnormal, and seems only set to challenge connectivity, rather than the group’s sound. Reality Awaits has no standout moments that present The Strokes’ message all that clearly. They’re clearly upset (as many of us having to live in reality are) with the state of the world. But they never convincingly make this the case and instead depend on floaty and unrefined commentaries about the emotional basics it’ll change. The closest they get to their point is Going to Babble On, presumably a play on words for Babylon, the thriving ancient city of beauty and wonder. But The Strokes offer neither beauty or wonder with their nine-track blowout.  

Reality Awaits feels reliant far too often on what came before for The Strokes. From references to the internet’s busiest music nerd to desires for a fresh start, Casablancas is letting the world and reality affect him more than he’d let on. Reality doesn’t await the band; it passed them by some years ago. It verges on fascinatingly pathetic, but only if you’re listening to the lyrics. The Strokes struggle to play catch-up when the goalposts have hardly shifted. Tired instrumental efforts that rely on this faux energetic tension are what the band struggles with most of all. Vaguely catchy at best, missing the point and purpose of its message with a thick layer of irony at worst. Reality does await. It awaits The Strokes to catch themselves up and work out the knots and kinks of this weak-willed latest.