The Strokes New Album “Reality Awaits” Fails to Impress

Album cover for the 2026 The Strokes album “Reality Awaits”. Photo credit: The Strokes and Richard Prince. “‘Reality Awaits’ is an at times enjoyable, often inscrutable, sometimes straight-up bizarre addition to the band’s story,” said Jon Dolan in his review of “Reality Awaits” for Rolling Stone Magazine, July 23rd 2026. 

Ian Biles, Feature Desk Lead 

Can a band come back from a six-year hiatus and create a cohesive album while simultaneously trying to change both their sound and identity? For New York City-based indie rock group The Strokes, the answer is a resounding no. Their new album “Reality Awaits” is their attempt to accomplish this feat for a second time, and it falls significantly flat when compared to the rest of the band’s body of work.  

Founded in NYC around 1998, The Strokes is one of the main groups credited with starting the 2000’s indie rock revival. Their 2001 debut “Is This It" sold 2 million copies worldwide and featured hits such as "Last Nite" and "Someday.” The band’s early sound was new and boundary-pushing, with characteristic vocal distortion and fast, motor-rhythm guitar and drums.  This new sound, along with other boundary-pushing NYC contemporaries such as LCD Soundsystem and Interpol, helped to cement New York City as a hotbed for both rock and rap music. 

The band’s sophomore album “Room on Fire” is another great album and a near-perfect replication of the indie sound that had become their signature. However, following the release of “Room on Fire,” the band began an unsuccessful string of 4 albums that ended with 2013’s “Comedown Machine,” a commercial failure that led to the band’s first extended hiatus.

In 2020, following a seven-year hiatus and rumors of a potential breakup, the band came together during the COVID-19 pandemic to release “The New Abnormal,” a redefining album. “The New Abnormal” was sleek and new, with a 45-minute runtime and a host of experimentation. Longer songs, autotune usage, and cinematic instrumentation all culminate in one of the band’s best works. When comparing “The New Abnormal” to the band's earlier failures at branching out their sound, it becomes apparent that the cohesiveness and success of this album is a fluke. The commercial failures of the band members' solo projects, specifically singer Julian Casablancas’s synth-pop record “Phrazes for the Young,” further exemplify the band's inability to experiment with sound. 

The band’s most recent failure “Reality Awaits” demonstrates this well. 

Clocking in at 42 minutes, the best thing about “Reality Awaits” is that it isn’t longer.  An overindulgent, cringey, and cobbled-together work, “Reality Awaits” sounds like the studio outtakes from a bad night out, and manages to make 9 songs seem like a double album. The opening track, “Psycho S***,” is a cringeworthy 5-minute escapade that utilizes an extended metaphor to compare love to a bird of prey.  While The Strokes as a band are not often credited for complex or deep lyricism, “Psycho S***” delivers directionless, meaningless lyrics that remain even harder to decipher because of the song's over-the-top auto-tune usage.  After finally escaping the opener, the user is allowed a brief respite with the album’s de facto highlight “Dine N’Dash.”

Opening with a minor-key interpolation of their popular song “The Adults Are Talking”, “Dine N’Dash” is almost a return to normalcy. With the autotune scaled back from the opening track, “Dine N’Dash” provides an interesting mix of minor-keyed instrumentation and lyrics reminiscent of a B-side from “The New Abnormal.” Listening to an instrumental of the next track “Lonely in The Future,” it's easy to tell why the song is the commercial standout.  With another familiar-sounding instrumental, “Lonely in the Future" winds its way through abrasive and whiny lyrics, such as an out-of-place diss of online music critic Anthony Fantano that feels unnecessary and baseless. From here, the album changes style, pivoting from the semi-familiar world of the second and third tracks and into the forgettable, 6-minute-long ballad “Falling Out of Love.” 

After finally wrapping up the bloated “Falling Out of Love,” the album delivers another decent track in “Going to Babble On,” which again features lyrics and instrumentation reminiscent of “The New Abnormal.” Again, though, a recurring theme of the album is almost reaching a cohesive sound and then falling out of the groove. The songs are inconsistent, and on first listen often seem to turn sharply in weird and unexpected directions. Moving from “Going to Babble” on to the album's first single “Going Shopping,” the listener is again reminded of when the band made better music. Save for the opening track, “Going Shopping” features the album’s worst lyricism with out of place one-liners such as “I wanna be a 7-foot zombie” muddling another decent instrumental. 

From here, the album ends on the unremarkable three-track run of “Liar’s Remorse,” “The Fruits of Conquest,” and “Tyrants of the Mellow Moon,” each continuing to represent the themes of bad lyricism and odd musical choices. 

Although the album contains moments of the band's former greatness, as a whole, the listening experience is confusing and disappointing. Creative instrumentals aren’t enough to save bloated track times, indulgent autotune, cringe-worthy lyrics, and a directionless concept. This album returns the band to earth and hopefully back to the chalkboard to find their old sound again.