The New Abnormal,<\/a> <\/em>got a little lost in the Covid malaise, its standout hit, \u201cThe Adults Are Talking,\u201d has as many Spotify streams as \u201cLast Nite.\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\tMillions of people would love some good new Strokes bangers (\u201cCan Julian Casablancas and the Strokes Really Save Rock & Roll?\u201d wonders a recent headline in The Irish Times<\/em>). Listening to their seventh record, one gets the sense that the band itself is only theoretically engaged by that specific proposition. Reality Awaits<\/em> is an at times enjoyable, often inscrutable, sometimes straight-up bizarre addition to the band\u2019s story.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\tCasablancas, a committed and active lefty, has some stuff to say about the state of the world, and though his commentary isn\u2019t always super coherent, that doesn\u2019t really matter when it\u2019s impacted into top-shelf Strokes-core.\u00a0On \u201cGoing Shopping,\u201d 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 \u201cSolidarity can be difficult when you\u2019ve got cool stuff to lose\u201d and \u201cWe\u2019re building castles from the bones of dead trees.\u201d The character in the song wants to leave the city and escape to the country, but then he gets bored and goes back.<\/p>\n\n\n
\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n
\n\tIt\u2019s pretty much exactly what you\u2019d expect the guy from \u201cMeet Me in the Bathroom\u201d to be singing about as he enters his late forties \u2014 and despite (and maybe because of) head-scratching admissions such as \u201cI want to be a seven-foot starfish,\u201d it hits. \u201cGoing to Babble On\u201d 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\u2019s straight Eighties fire. \u201cLonely in the Future,\u201d which opens with a scuzzy hard-rock riff, is an aging cool kid\u2019s been-there-done-that swipe at today\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\tElsewhere, Casablancas\u2019 myriad indulgences and idiosyncrasies bog things down, often seeming as if he\u2019s trying to link up the Strokes with the abstruse art-pop he makes in his other band, the Voidz.\u00a0On the album opening \u201cPsycho Shit,\u201d 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 \u201cLiar\u2019s Remorse,\u201d his voice takes on a Caribbean lilt as he sings an emulsified swing ballad \u2014 after a solo on what sounds like a trumpet played through an effects pedal, he inexplicably implores \u201cHarmonic minor!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n
\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n
\n\tThese surprising little vocal flourishes come up in other places \u2014 in \u201cFalling Out of Love,\u201d he low talks like Leonard Cohen, and over the Cure\/New Order guitars of the otherwise loverly \u201cDine And Dash,\u201d he puts on an English accent that kind of sounds like Christopher Guest in Spinal Tap.<\/em> Throughout, the use of vocal processing is heavy, which becomes especially grating on the album\u2019s slower songs, upending what might\u2019ve been a dreamy, distracted elegance. \u201cThe Fruits of Conquest\u201d has a good open-shirted Stones slither, but his disco-Dracula slapstick pretty much destroys it.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n
\n\tOn The New Abnormal,<\/em> the band wandered into some similarly loopy musical cul de sacs, but that album also had moments like \u201cBrooklyn Bridge to Chorus\u201d and \u201cOde to the Mets,\u201d surreal, sidelong estimations of their status as New York rock icons, giving the whole thing a long-strange-trip relatability. This record\u2019s less musically grabby moments feel more insular and ostentatious in their weirdness. At only nine songs, Reality Awaits<\/em> feels longer than it ought to. It climaxes with the moody epic \u201cTyrants of the Mellow Moon,\u201d capped by a big laser-prog guitar solo. The song offers an oblong echo of the desultory wooziness that used to evoke leatherjacket ragamuffins collapsing into a cab together on the way to the next bar. You can\u2019t stay that way forever, and it\u2019s good to try not to. But this feels a little more like falling off the edge of reality itself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.rollingstone.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Strokes\u2019 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\u2019s first in 20 years, saw them light up a multigenerational audience of young olds and old youngs. Their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2514002,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[496131,476625],"class_list":["post-2514001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-julian-casablancas-the-voidz","tag-strokes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/The-Strokes-\u2018Reality-Awaits-Album-Review-Reality-Bites-Hard.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2514001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2514001"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2514001\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2514003,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2514001\/revisions\/2514003"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2514002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2514001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2514001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2514001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}