Reality Awaits review | Nine songs, no consensus

Julian Casablancas spends most of Reality Awaits singing through heavy AutoTune, and for the first couple of songs it sounds exactly like what it is: a safety net. Then something shifts. By the third or fourth track, the processing stops reading as a fix and starts working as an actual choice, a way of singing from somewhere flatter and more distant than his real voice would allow.

This is The Strokes’ seventh album, their first since 2020’s The New Abnormal, written over several weeks in Costa Rica with Rick Rubin producing again. They announced it the way they announce most things now, obliquely, via a vintage Nissan ad reading “In the flesh, it’s even sexier.” It’s a smaller joke than the album needs, but it’s at least the right kind of joke.

‘Going Shopping’ is the record’s one clean, unmistakably Strokes moment. Albert Hammond Jr. and Nick Valensi trade guitar lines over a lyric about comfort curdling into apathy: The worse reality gets the less you wanna hear about it, solidarity can be difficult when you’ve got cool stuff to lose. It’s tight, hooky, and almost a decoy, because barely anything else here plays it that straight.

Elsewhere the guitars stop chiming and start circling, closer to Television than to anything on Is This It. The songs wander before snapping back into focus, sometimes mid-bar, which is more interesting on paper than it always is on the ninth or tenth listen. Closer ‘Tyrants of the Mellow Moon’ is the clearest example: a laser-guided guitar solo arrives exactly when the song should be climaxing, and it never quite convinces you it’s earned the moment rather than just claimed it.

That’s the album’s actual flaw, and it has nothing to do with AutoTune. At only nine tracks, Reality Awaits still manages to feel a little too long, because too many of its detours arrive without doing enough once they get there.

What it gets right, it gets right by refusing the easy version of a comeback. A band in its forties chasing 2001 again would have been safer and worse. This is a stranger record than that, not always a better one, but a far more honest attempt at being a band still figuring out what it sounds like now.

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