The Strokes Reality Awaits Review: A Strange, Restless Return

Reality Awaits is worth hearing because it refuses to repeat The New Abnormal. The Strokes sound curious, funny and occasionally messy, combining familiar guitar precision with Julian Casablancas at his most processed and unpredictable. The album is not consistently brilliant, but its best songs make the risk worthwhile.

Six years after The New Abnormal, The Strokes return with an album that sounds less interested in protecting their legacy than disturbing it. Reality Awaits is the band’s seventh studio album, produced by Rick Rubin and released on July 24, 2026. Across nine songs and roughly 42 minutes, the group moves between elegant guitar pop, electronic vocal manipulation, nervous funk, dub textures and sections that feel deliberately unstable.

Listeners who only want another Is This It may find the record frustrating. Those who enjoyed the way The New Abnormal stretched the band’s formula should find more to explore here. The songs are less immediately polished, but they also feel alive. For another recent music-led feature on the site, the Voicemails for Isabelle soundtrack guide shows how carefully chosen songs can shape a screen story, while KPop Demon Hunters cast, songs and ending explained explores a film built around music as narrative power.

Reality Awaits Review at a Glance

What Does Reality Awaits Sound Like?

The album’s central tension is simple: The Strokes still know how to make a sharp, economical rock song, but Julian Casablancas increasingly prefers sounds that blur, bend or sabotage that neatness. Reality Awaits places those instincts in the same room. The guitars remain controlled and recognizable, especially when Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. lock into intersecting lines, while Fabrizio Moretti and Nikolai Fraiture keep the rhythm section disciplined. Over that foundation, Casablancas treats his voice as another unstable instrument.

AutoTune and other vocal effects are not used merely to repair a performance. They become part of the character of the record. At times the processing creates distance, as though the singer is communicating through damaged technology. Elsewhere it makes a joke funnier, a melody stranger or a vulnerable line harder to read. The approach will divide listeners. Some moments sound inspired, while others make the emotional center of a song more difficult to reach.

Rick Rubin’s production helps the band preserve space. Even when the arrangements become unusual, the instruments rarely collapse into an indistinct wall. The result is a record that can feel chaotic in concept but surprisingly clean in execution. Its oddest details are usually easy to hear, which makes repeat listening rewarding.

The Best Songs on Reality Awaits

Going to Babble On

Going to Babble On is the album’s most convincing meeting point between old and new. The song has a gentle, instantly readable melody, but it avoids becoming a nostalgia exercise. Casablancas sounds unusually open, and the arrangement gives the emotional idea room to breathe. It is the kind of song that proves The Strokes do not need to imitate their debut to sound direct.

Going Shopping

Going Shopping rides a relaxed groove that grows more interesting as the guitars become increasingly active around it. The humor in the performance keeps the track light, yet the lyrics also acknowledge age, relevance and the strange experience of remaining a youth-culture symbol long after youth has passed. It works as a lead single because it introduces the album’s playful self-awareness without revealing every eccentric turn.

Lonely in the Future

Lonely in the Future is one of the album’s clearest reminders that the band can still create urgency with a relatively simple framework. It moves quickly, keeps its melodic target in sight and gives the record needed momentum. The track is especially effective after the heavier opening songs because it shows that experimentation does not have to mean slow or shapeless.

The Fruits of Conquest

The Fruits of Conquest is darker and more slippery. Its repeated vocal ideas, dub-influenced atmosphere and slightly threatening pulse recall the band’s mid-career interest in 1980s textures. It is not the most accessible song here, but it strengthens the album’s personality and becomes more persuasive after several listens.

Where the Album Loses Focus

The record’s freedom sometimes becomes indulgence. Falling out of Love and Liar’s Remorse contain compelling passages, but their emotional effect is weakened when the vocal treatment attracts more attention than the songs underneath it. The issue is not that the album uses technology. The issue is that the strongest Strokes songs normally create a sharp relationship between voice, rhythm and guitar, and a few moments here make that relationship unnecessarily difficult to follow.

The closing track, Tyrants of the Mellow Moon, is the clearest example. It contains interesting tones, a brief guitar flare and a spoken ending that fits the album’s strange mood. However, it does not gather those parts into a satisfying final statement. The track drifts when the album needs resolution. An imperfect closer does not erase the record’s earlier successes, but it makes the overall experience feel longer than a nine-song album should.

Is Reality Awaits Better Than The New Abnormal?

The New Abnormal is the more cohesive and emotionally immediate album. It offered a clearer arc and several songs that quickly established themselves within the band’s catalogue. Reality Awaits is less consistent but more unpredictable. Its value lies in hearing a veteran group risk awkwardness rather than deliver a safe sequel to a successful record.

Listeners looking for a single recommendation should start with The New Abnormal. Longtime fans who already understand the band’s strengths may find Reality Awaits more interesting to discuss. It opens more questions than it answers, especially about how much influence Casablancas’s work with The Voidz will continue to have on future Strokes records.

Complete Reality Awaits Tracklist

Who Should Listen?

• Listen if you enjoy The Strokes but want the band to keep changing rather than repeat its early sound.
• Listen if unusual vocal processing, loose structures and small production details make you return to an album.
• Start with Going to Babble On or Going Shopping if you want the most accessible entry point.
• Skip it if AutoTune-heavy vocals immediately prevent you from connecting with a rock song.
• Do not expect a clean revival of the band’s first two albums.

Final Verdict

Reality Awaits is an uneven but valuable Strokes album. Its strongest moments combine melodic discipline with the restless imagination Casablancas has developed outside the band. Its weakest moments confuse eccentricity with depth, and the ending fails to provide the payoff the record deserves. Even so, the album sounds like five musicians testing what their identity can hold, not simply maintaining a brand.

That makes the album easier to admire than to love immediately. It may also make it more durable. The hooks reveal themselves gradually, the jokes become clearer and the stranger production choices invite debate. Reality Awaits is not a definitive late-career masterpiece, but it is proof that The Strokes still have somewhere unexpected to go.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

• RCA Records – Reality Awaits album information
• Apple Music – Reality Awaits
• The Guardian – Reality Awaits review
• Rolling Stone Australia – Reality Awaits review