The Strokes - Reality Awaits Review
Reality Awaits was plagued by criticism over its use of Auto-Tune, but is the record really as bad as everyone thinks?
It's been six years since The New Abnormal, the album that finally reunited critics and fans behind The Strokes. It felt like a genuine return to form, their most consistently celebrated record since Room on Fire. Once again they've teamed up with Rick Rubin, but Reality Awaits arrives carrying a very different kind of expectation.
Somehow, Julian Casablancas' use of Auto-Tune has become one of the year's great musical controversies. It's as if we're living in 2006 and pitch correction is still a shocking new invention, rather than something virtually every artist recording in a professional studio uses. Julian's approach might be more obvious than most, but that's hardly the scandal it's been made out to be. The problem is that, in 2026, everyone is the media. Every album release becomes a pile-on, every opinion becomes content, and artists are built up only to be gleefully torn back down again. The Strokes know that cycle better than most. Once hailed as the saviours of rock music, they've spent the last two decades living under impossible expectations, and Reality Awaits has become an album many people have already made their minds up about before hearing it.
The album opens with 'Psycho Shit', which begins with broken guitar arpeggios and swelling synths before Casablancas' signature croon drifts in. Despite the title, it's surprisingly restrained. The track spends most of its runtime slowly building before finally exploding towards the end. It's a solid opener, though I can't help wishing that payoff arrived a little earlier. Casablancas' vocal melody is great and, yes, there's Auto-Tune, but it suits the song. Lyrically, it’s another broad attack on hierarchy, conformity and the people who blindly follow both. It's territory Casablancas has been exploring since Tyranny and Virtue, with the repeated "teacher's pet, the way of death" acting as the song's mission statement.
'Dine N' Dash' leans further into the synths, something The Strokes have gradually made their own over the years. The shimmering '80s-inspired chorus is catchy, but the song never really gets going. It lacks the urgency that the band's best material seems to summon with ease.
Now, ‘Lonely in the Future’ is what I’m talking about. This is The Strokes through and through. The opening riff is instantly infectious, Casablancas has written one of the album's strongest vocal melodies here, and the whole thing has an energy that's been missing up to this point. I’m sure people will have a field day about a lyric referencing infamous music reviewer Anthony Fantano, but I enjoy the jab at criticism itself. It’s Casablancas arguing that great art is rarely understood straight away. Whether he's right or not, it's an interesting lyric to release into the world given how quickly this album was judged.
‘Falling out of Love’ was the album's second single and, at first, I was a bit underwhelmed. It was one of the few tracks where I understood the autotune criticism because it moves at such a slow pace. But it's really grown on me. It sits beautifully in the album's sequencing, a slow ballad about realising you're falling out of love. The delicate guitars, melodic bassline and brooding synth outro are gorgeous, and Casablancas' heavily processed vocals at the end are eerily beautiful.
Next up is ‘Going to Babble On’, a soulful, incredibly catchy track with one of the album's strongest verse-chorus structures. "Sometimes it feels like the world is just moving too fast" is probably the most direct lyric here. When Casablancas follows it with "No one is struggling as hard as you", he's poking fun at our tendency to believe our own suffering is uniquely difficult. Everyone feels overwhelmed.
The song captures the strange exhaustion of modern life, where everyone has something to say but very few people are actually listening. The title itself almost sounds like a shrug, admitting it's contributing to the noise. The repeated "Starting again" becomes the emotional centre of the song, suggesting we're all trapped in the same cycle of refreshing the page and hoping for something different.
Lead single ‘Going Shopping’ received a wildly disproportionate amount of hate. I'll admit I even searched "Going Shopping without autotune" on YouTube, but if Casablancas using autotune still surprises you after the last 15 years, where have you been? It was all over The New Abnormal too. More importantly, it's a great song. The lyrics are delightfully absurd, full of seven-foot zombies, shopping malls and starfish, while the central riff feels like it should've been a classic years ago. The chorus is ridiculously catchy and, yes, this is a good Strokes song. Fight me.
Reality Awaits is The Strokes at their most synthetic. The wiry garage guitars are still here, but they're often pushed behind shimmering synths, slower tempos and heavily processed vocals. It's less immediate than The New Abnormal, more interested in atmosphere than punch, and often closer to Julian's solo work than classic Strokes records.
‘Liar’s Remorse’ opens with lovely plucked strings and is one of the emotional cornerstones of Reality Awaits, built around the quietly devastating refrain, "You don't have love because you don't want pain." Casablancas argues that love and heartbreak are inseparable, while lines like "Listen to the AI tell you what to do today" feed into the album's wider themes of outsourcing our instincts to technology and society. There's also a brilliant moment towards the end where the guitar almost sounds like a Mariachi-esque trumpet (before Jules somewhat ruins it by saying "harmonic minor").
‘The Fruits of Conquest’ is probably the weakest track on the album. Musically it's all over the place, especially after the chorus, and Julian's creepy backrooms children's TV presenter delivery doesn't help. Even the repeated "I'm a leech" never really lands. The song never seems to know what it wants to be. This probably should've been left off the record.
Closing the album, ‘Tyrants of the Mellow Moon’ opens with a broken guitar melody that's suspiciously close to Radiohead's 'Faust Arp' before finding its own identity. Thankfully, it's one of the strongest songs here. The descending chorus guitar, fluid bassline and shimmering, fuzz-soaked finale make for a genuinely beautiful closer. Lyrically, the song embraces impermanence. Casablancas repeats "I can't wait" before undercutting it with "At the end, must let all songs die." Rather than tying Reality Awaits into a neat conclusion, the album ends by accepting that love, youth, certainty and even music itself eventually come to an end. It's an unexpectedly moving finish.
What initially seems like another Julian Casablancas polemic about society gradually reveals itself to be something far more personal. Across the album, politics, relationships, consumerism and nostalgia all become different ways of avoiding uncomfortable truths. That's what makes the title Reality Awaits so effective. Reality isn't some looming apocalypse, it's the moment the stories we tell ourselves stop working.
Unfortunately, not every song on the album lands. ‘The Fruits of Conquest’ saps momentum just before the finale, but 'Tyrants of the Mellow Moon' restores the album's emotional balance with a graceful farewell.
Reviews force you to make your mind up, and after living with Reality Awaits for a while, I think it has a lot going for it. No, it's not Is This It and it's not the comeback moment that The New Abnormal was, but it might be The Strokes' most thematically cohesive record. Unfortunately, thematic cohesion doesn't always translate into consistently great songs. There are a couple of genuine highlights here, a couple of tracks that don't quite work, and an album that's far better than its reputation suggests, provided you can get over the Auto-Tune and yourself.
