"Reality Awaits" Will Be Loved By The Next Strokes Album (Which Will Be Hated)

Thank you for reading Evil Speakers. Look for part one of “Catalog Club: Neil Young (1990-1996)” on Monday, discussing 1990’s “Ragged Glory.” Also, don’t forget to pre-order my book “Is This It: The Never-Ending Rise And Fall Of The Strokes (And Rock ‘‘n’ Roll)” out in just over a month, on Sept. 8.

This column is like an epilogue to that book. It’s about the new Strokes album, “Reality Awaits,” and the reaction to that record, as well as their current tour, the band’s most extensive in years. There are also reviews of new albums by Frank Hurricane, Idle County, and Prairiewolf.

To all my paying subscribers — thank you for making this newsletter viable.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The Strokes put out a new album and lots of people online were very vocal about not liking it. It’s not what they expected. It was “unfocused.” It was “mid.” But mainly, it wasn’t good like Is This It was good. Or even good like whatever the last Strokes album was. Though that album also was once deemed “mid,” except now the new one seems “mid” in comparison to that one. It’s like they’re not even trying now, really. Just a big ol’ disappointment.

I could be describing the early reactions to the new Strokes record, Reality Awaits. Or I could be summing up the initial responses to every Strokes record save the first one, a span of time that runs a full two decades. All that while, The Strokes have been letting people down. Which isn’t all that unusual for any act commonly associated with an iconic debut. What’s unique about The Strokes is the Groundhog Day nature of it all. For most of their history, they (and by “they” I mostly mean Julian Casablancas) have been a willfully odd art-rock band that relishes undercutting whatever might seem straight-forwardly pleasurable about their music. (Never forget: The Strokes are an early aughts band that is philosophically early nineties.) Overly busy arrangements, treated vocals, murky production, bizarre lyrical tangents, head-scratching song titles — it all has been endemic to Strokes albums since at least First Impressions Of Earth, released way back in 2006. Even before that, it’s not like they were trafficking in easy-to-love pop-rock anthems like their not-so-friendly rivals in The Killers. Step outside your own nostalgia and notice how the guitar and drum sounds on Is This It (to say nothing of the famously distorted vocals) are pared way back compared with the typical major-label rock record of the era. Even when they were young bucks currying media favor, they were always screwing around with something, mostly the public’s expectations.

And yet nobody seems to remember any of this whenever a new Strokes album comes out. Instead, when they do their “odd art-rock band” thing, it somehow registers once more as some kind of shock. For instance: “Millions of people would love some good new Strokes bangers,” Rolling Stone posited in their ambivalent-to-hostile Reality Awaits review, while invoking an apparently recent newspaper headline asking whether The Strokes can “really save rock ‘n’ roll.” (Seriously! In 2026! Someone published this!) “Listening to their seventh record,” the magazine concluded, “one gets the sense that the band itself is only theoretically engaged by that specific proposition.”

You don’t say! I say this with a genuine tinge of alarm: Am I living alone in a dimension where odd art-rock albums like Angles and Comedown Machine exist? If I am, should I assume that Julian’s extremely odd art-rock side project the Voidz also did not breach this separation of realities? (Funny enough, “breaching this separation of realities” sounds like the premise of a Voidz song.)

Now, I know I am not literally living in some bizarro-world timeline from the one where these album reviews reside. But they sure make me feel that way. The Rolling Stone write-up reminds of Pitchfork’s take on 2020’s The New Abnormal, which dinged The Strokes (in another ambivalent-to-hostile review) for being “increasingly uninterested in the tight, classic songcraft that once felt entirely their own.” Of course, as Rolling Stone noted when comparing that album to the allegedly lackluster Reality Awaits, The Strokes in retrospect now seemed to be relatively interested in “tight, classic songcraft” on The New Abnormal after all, particularly in light of “The Adults Are Talking,” a thoroughly Strokesian-sounding hit that ranks with their most famous golden oldies in terms of streaming numbers.

I don’t think there is anything like it in modern music. The amnesia (or is it just lazy thinking?) that greets Strokes albums is stuck somewhere between a constantly boomeranging time warp and a deeply toxic relationship between a highly dysfunctional and emotionally withholding band and a segment of their fanbase (and the media) addicted to perpetual dismay. (You now see where the “never-ending” part of my new book’s title comes from.) What’s truly perverse is how this dismay always attaches to the latest Strokes record, therefore inadvertently improving the reputation of the predecessor in the process. The New Abnormal now seems like a happy medium of experimentation and accessibility after Reality Awaits, just as First Impressions of Earth (which was “not enough like Is This It”) made Room On Fire (which was “too much like Is This It”) sound like a masterpiece, and Angles (where “they didn’t try hard enough”) made First Impressions (where “they tried way too hard”) seem ambitious and fascinating, and Comedown Machine (where “they really didn’t try hard enough”) made Angles (which even haters must concede has some great singles) seem underrated, and so on and so on.