New album from The Strokes: The noughties are over, the new reality is now available on record

While there was still – and still is – speculation as to whether a dispute over Gaza between the Jew Valensi and the Palestine activist Julian Casablancas had become deeply embedded in the internal architecture of the most important indie rock band of the past 30 years, the Strokes released two singles whose exaggerated use of autotune was largely met with little enthusiasm, although at least “Falling Out Of Love” is a very pretty song. Meanwhile, the Strokes are constantly playing concerts with Schiltz, including in Germany next fall, and are not releasing any interviews or other information about their new album, which was also available to the record company shortly before its release.

Autotune is here to stay

Anyone who already counted bourgeois autotune components in the two preliminary singles must now be strong: the album begins again with a song characterized by strong vocal alienation. It’s titled “Psycho Shit” and is a somewhat epic song in the vein that the band last placed in the second half of their previous album “The New Abnormal”. Already in the second song, “Dine And Dash”, Julian Casablancas sounds completely confused and confused, as we know from him. Louder guitars, something like a typical Strokes song, only come afterwards with “Lonely In The Future”.

The band already had the basics for the album in 2022 Rick Rubin created it in a session in Costa Rica in order to flesh it out over the following years in numerous studios all over the world, so an improvised basis was produced to the maximum here. Judging by the outcome, Julian Casablancas may have resumed his former leadership role in this process.

“Reality Awaits” is an album characterized on the one hand by the joy of playing and experimenting, but above all by the singer’s finely detailed, sufficiently wound tapeworm melodies that always take surprising turns. It is not, or only partially, a classic Strokes album. But something that takes time, seems unspectacular at first glance, sometimes even sloppy – and ultimately grows immeasurably.

A soundtrack of an exhausted world in a state of constant overwhelm, in which the iconic Strokes guitars synergize with electronic means of sound production in a way that they had not yet achieved in 2023 with “Comedown Machine”. An album that is thoughtful in its content and permeated by alienation and political tones, which predominantly contains tired-sounding mid-tempo songs and ballads, but with which the Strokes, despite this classification, present themselves as a vital creative unit – and not as the incessantly touring live nation cash cow that many had recently perceived them as. The Strokes have left the indie rock heydays of the early noughties far behind them.