Lately, Casablancas has been attempting laborious to be heard, however he’s incapable of expressing a political opinion with out ironic padding. Anyone anticipating a Rage Against the Machine flip after the Strokes’ anti-imperialist 2026 Coachella performance of “Oblivius” ought to recall that Casablancas joked to some Oxford students a pair months later that he thought the daring agitprop stage design could be “a treat that influencers would really appreciate.” And Casablancas’ viral “Subway Takes” assertion that “American Zionists get the benefits of white privileged people but talk like they are Black people during slavery” got here solely after he excoriated voice memos and trendy automobiles. Deeply conscious of the inseparability of medium and the message, Casablancas rues the web’s flattening impact on communication whereas encouraging you to Use This Sound. Reality Awaits sits inside that stress, totally conscious of the bit, each sonically and lyrically. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it ends in the Strokes’ loosest, funniest, and finest album since earlier than Facebook launched—which, certain, given the wildly various high quality of the band’s final 4 albums, seems like damning with faint reward. But it’s additionally a welcome acknowledgement that the Strokes lastly appear comfy dovetailing their festival-headlining elder-statesmen standing with Casablancas’ want to satisfy the techno-political second on his phrases.
Casablancas’ tongue-in-cheek radicalism resonates with Gen Z, who’re increasingly intolerant of U.S. imperialism—and who generated a recent period for the band by meming the anti-authoritarian lockdown-era single “The Adults Are Talking” into the Strokes’ most-streamed tune. The band elaborates their new shtick on “The Fruits of Conquest,” the primary half of which is slinky and assured, sounding just like the Strokes’ early 2000s contemporaries Spoon, with Casablancas growling, “They don’t obey, so we won’t obey.” Then, because the second half grows darker and extra self-effacing, he moans “I’m a leech,” again and again, letting his trademark self-doubt overwhelm the tune for a minute. Close your eyes and it’s simple to think about a sea of competition attendees who had been born after First Impressions of Earth chanting each phrases with equal fervor, or setting up new TikTok rabbit warrens out of them. Grotesque impulses pervade the album, like how on “Dine N’Dash” he worms his method towards Idiot-era Iggy Pop loucheness, “Liar’s Remorse” stretches romantic repentance into psychedelic territory, and “Tyrants of the Mellow Moon,” with Casablancas in sad-robot Roy Rogers mode, is the album’s finest evocation of its deconstructed cigarette ad cowl artwork.
But after all, the Strokes can solely experiment a lot: Though Casablancas would favor to reduce this truth, they’re as a lot a dependable model as a band, having taken full possession of a sound that, sarcastically, itself as soon as felt like an uncanny synthesis of the 1976-1982 dance/punk second. So listening to slight variations on their sonic signature in 2026—tight guitar harmonizing, fast downstrumming, a disco band’s rhythm part, Casablancas’ arty hangdog moue—can really feel just like the Strokes protecting the Strokes. On Reality, “Going to Babble On” and particularly “Lonely in the Future” are the umpteenth updates on the band’s Mk 1 coke-bump new wave. “Future” is the clearest candidate for viral circulation on the album, Casablancas rummaging by means of popular culture references like Ezra Koenig, namedropping the liberal U.S. international coverage critic Chris Hedges, complicated Josh Groban and John Legend, and licking pictures at YouTube music critic Anthony Fantano (who’s already responded). Over the glammy power-pop of “Babble,” the admonition “Don’t ever do what they say” feels aimed as a lot at his report business bosses as the worldwide energy bloc. Either method, his trendy exhaustion reveals itself every time he croons that he’s “starting again.”
