The Strokes Reality Awaits Is Their Nuttiest Album Yet
The Strokes' Reality Awaits is the New York band's seventh album: a doomy, Auto-Tune-heavy rock record that critics call their nuttiest and, in Pitchfork's view, their loosest and funniest since before Facebook. Out in 2026 on RCA, it leans into Julian Casablancas' Voidz-style weirdness while keeping the band's signature guitar punch.
Key Takeaways
- Reality Awaits is The Strokes' first LP since 2020's Grammy-winning The New Abnormal, released July 24, 2026 on RCA.
- Pitchfork and the Los Angeles Times both flag heavy Auto-Tune, midlife satire, and the band's weirdest catalog entry yet.
- Lead single "Going Shopping" pairs a jaunty groove with a Walton Goggins video that restages Paul Simon's "You Can Call Me Al."
- Standouts include "Psycho Shit," "Dine N'Dash," "Lonely in the Future," and "The Fruits of Conquest."
- The band remains arena- and festival-big with Gen Z fans, even as Casablancas pushes Voidz-adjacent experiments.
Why does The Strokes Reality Awaits sound so strange?
Twenty-five years after Is This It, The Strokes are as big as ever — playing arenas, headlining festivals, and racking up streams with Gen Z. So dropping an album full of arcane jokes, baffling vocal affects, and light conspiracy theorizing lands as peak bizarre news for a once-cool garage-rock brand.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Reality Awaits is easily the nuttiest entry in the catalog. Opener "Psycho Shit" coats Casablancas in Auto-Tune for a spooky slow burn. "Falling Out of Love" turns into lilting robo-country; "Liar's Remorse" stretches repentance into psychedelic, accent-heavy territory.
Pitchfork hears Voidz-era '80s sensibilities crashing the Strokes' walls more than ever. If you hate expressionist pitch correction, the review warns, you will not like this record — but the Auto-Tune still reads as a distancing move, much like the band's early vocal distortion.
What songs define The Strokes Reality Awaits?
Lead single "Going Shopping" is the album's jauntiest cut and its sharpest capitalism jab. Casablancas sings he is "an old man now," then decamps for the sticks before ending up happily at the mall. The video casts Walton Goggins as Chevy Chase to Julian's Paul Simon, then ends with the band and clowns dancing before off-screen gunfire.
"The Fruits of Conquest" flips from Spoon-like confidence ("They don't obey, so we won't obey") into self-effacing "I'm a leech" chants. "Lonely in the Future" name-drops Chris Hedges, confuses Josh Groban and John Legend, and takes a shot at YouTube critic Anthony Fantano. Consequence even slotted "Dine N'Dash" into its Strokes 15-best list, calling it one of the band's most unpredictable tracks.
"Going to Babble On" and "Lonely in the Future" still update the classic Strokes Mk 1 new-wave punch — tight guitar harmonies, quick downstrums, disco-tight rhythm — so the brand never fully disappears under the bit.
Is Reality Awaits actually any good?
Pitchfork calls it the Strokes' loosest, funniest, and best album since before Facebook launched — faint praise given the uneven last four records, but a real welcome for a festival-headlining band finally meeting Casablancas' techno-political moment on his terms.
The L.A. Times hears pure pleasure when the guitars slash on "Dine N' Dash," "Going to Babble On," and "Lonely in the Future," even as the philosophy feels closer to a Casablancas or Voidz project than classic Strokes. Either way, Reality Awaits finds five guys in their 40s acting like TikTok rock stars while the world burns — serious, weird, catchy, and doomy all at once.