Jon Dolan
View all posts by Jon Dolan July 23, 2026
Johann Rashid* The Strokes’ stock is pretty high in 2026, definitely higher than it was in 2016, and maybe even 2006. This year marks the 25th anniversary of their classic debut, Is This It? Their recent tour, the band’s first in 20 years, saw them light up a multigenerational audience of young olds and old youngs. Their standing isn’t only based on nostalgia either: Though the last Strokes album, 2020’s The New Abnormal, got a little lost in the Covid malaise, its standout hit, “The Adults Are Talking,” has as many Spotify streams as “Last Nite.” Meanwhile, the biggest indie band around, Geese, is undeniably post-post-Strokes, even if the band members were still in their strollers back when Julian, Albert, Fab, Nick, and Nikolai owned the night. Not a bad legacy to keep rolling into your second quarter century.
Millions of people would love some good new Strokes bangers (“Can Julian Casablancas and the Strokes Really Save Rock & Roll?” wonders a recent headline in The Irish Times). Listening to their seventh record, one gets the sense that the band itself is only theoretically engaged by that specific proposition. Reality Awaits is an at times enjoyable, often inscrutable, sometimes straight-up bizarre addition to the band’s story.
Casablancas, a committed and active lefty, has some stuff to say about the state of the world, and though his commentary isn’t always super coherent, that doesn’t really matter when it’s impacted into top-shelf Strokes-core. On “Going Shopping,” drummer Fab Moretti bounces along with clipped precision as guitarists Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. unspool some nifty Television-in-a-teapot interplay, and Casablancas kicks political complaints like “Solidarity can be difficult when you’ve got cool stuff to lose” and “We’re building castles from the bones of dead trees.” The character in the song wants to leave the city and escape to the country, but then he gets bored and goes back.
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It’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect the guy from “Meet Me in the Bathroom” to be singing about as he enters his late forties — and despite (and maybe because of) head-scratching admissions such as “I want to be a seven-foot starfish,” it hits. “Going to Babble On” is another gem: Julian begs and pouts about the velocity of modern life over the neo-New Wave this band does just about as well as anyone in human history, culminating into a spiraling, spandex guitar solo that’s straight Eighties fire. “Lonely in the Future,” which opens with a scuzzy hard-rock riff, is an aging cool kid’s been-there-done-that swipe at today’s totally-online generation. (The lyrics cast a skeptical eye towards adherents of political commentator Chris Hedges and online music reviewer Anthony Fantano.) Remarkably, the song itself is catchy enough that this all goes by in a speedy jumble, like it could be just one more cute little rocker about chasing girls and staying up all night.
Elsewhere, Casablancas’ myriad indulgences and idiosyncrasies bog things down, often seeming as if he’s trying to link up the Strokes with the abstruse art-pop he makes in his other band, the Voidz. On the album opening “Psycho Shit,” he sings about predatory violence with obvious overtones of the war in Gaza, and corporate imperialism in general, as the song meanders and grinds toward its diffuse combustion. On the resolutely sucky “Liar’s Remorse,” his voice takes on a Caribbean lilt as he sings an emulsified swing ballad — after a solo on what sounds like a trumpet played through an effects pedal, he inexplicably implores “Harmonic minor!”
