You wouldn’t mistake the Strokes for any other band on Reality Awaits. Well, maybe Julian Casablancas’ other band, the Voidz, which has allowed him to experiment with AutoTune in ways that now frustrate and divide his core fanbase, if not enough to jeopardize the Strokes brand. The follow-up to 2020’s career-revitalizing The New Abnormal is a strange attempt at portraying a disaffected, shadowy world sapped of humanity while remaining playful and immediate, capitalizing on their crowd-pleasing instincts just when the mood gets too grim. But in its clumsy, ambling structure, the balance is thrown off before the album even hits its midpoint, each member flirting with flashes of brilliance but fumbling in their coordination. It’s in Reality Awaits’ conceptual interests that it struggles to be soulful, but the few moments that actually are leave you craving for more.
1. Psycho Shit
The slow-burning arpeggios might be the first sign that the Strokes have no interest in replicating the immediate hookiness of The New Abnormal’s opener ‘The Adults Are Talking’, currently their most streamed song. ‘Psycho Shit’ is both the strangest and most fitting way to open Reality Awaits; if you can stomach his pitch-shifted vocals for more than five minutes, there might be something for you here. He doesn’t merely coast on AutoTune but craves an impressive emotional arc through and in spite of it – instead of making things easier, it makes the strain in his voice audible, weirder. When he pleads to be lowered down, it’s implausibly high and indecipherable. But some words inevitably cut through, ready to be quoted: “Only my beloved songs will define me.”
2. Dine N’Dash
The monstrous atmosphere of ‘Psycho Shit’ lingers on, but the band injects a driving pulse and instantly satisfying interlocking guitars to get the album’s gears turning. While Casablancas’ voice isn’t as heavily effected, he tries some bizarre things with it – spoken word, a British accent? – as he gets into character. He swaps one hook for another with the same haphazardness, which is a shame, because at least a couple of them stick out.
3. Lonely in the Future
Casablancas’ vocal playfulness becomes insufferable on the otherwise groovy ‘Lonely in the Future’. “And in a hundred thousand days from now, I’ll say/ I did that yesterday when I was a kid,” he sings, and AutoTune may be the mask of agelessness, but that doesn’t make it any less grating. Any sense of gravity or momentum is squashed in favour of cheap satire.
4. Falling Out of Love
For a moment, ‘Falling Out of Love’ seems to be the moment Reality Awaits regains its composure, where AutoTune’s disorienting effect aids a much more resonant portrait of solitude than the previous track. But while Casablancas finds interesting pockets of melody as the song meanders, it bears none of the dynamism of ‘Psycho Shit’ and struggles to justify being the longest song on the record.
5. Going to Babble On
We finally get the band at their most approachable, even relatable; ‘Going to Babble On’ is so “classic Strokes” that not making it a single feels like oddly deliberate. While not really a song of resistance, it inhabits the headspace of mindlessly obeying corporate structures without emotionally resigning itself. If anything, the dual solo at the end counts as a small triumph.
6. Going Shopping
The single theoretically conjures the same level of immediacy as the previous track, hitting the same thematic territory, but the vocal processing as Casablancas sings about wanting to be “a 7-foot zombie” is distracting, to say the least. ‘Going Shopping’ prods at a collective ennui without rising above it: “The worse reality gets, the less you wanna hear about it/ Solidarity can be difficult/ When you got cool stuff to lose.” It’s a little too absurd and unsettling to qualify as mere “cool stuff,” but you get why most fans could take it or leave it.
7. Liar’s Remorse
Malaise and minimalism go hand in hand on ‘Liar’s Remorse’, a ghostly psych-ballad about a man so enamoured with AI he can’t think for himself, let alone find true love. The guitars are prickly and disorienting, blending into the rest of the instrumentation as if struggling to stay in the human world. It’s the most affecting song on the record.
8. The Fruits of Conquest
It starts out strong enough, but ‘The Fruits of Conquest’ quickly grows into a mess of incongruous ideas. What is this interplay between the guitar riff and Casablancas’ falsetto as he repeats “I’m a leech” a dozen times too many? Why’s that synth blaring over bongos? There’s tension all over the place, but it scans as a rough draft.
9. Tyrants of the Mellow Moon
The album’s vaporous closer disperses the shadowy energy of the last few tracks, reminding me of the time Casablancas asked a festival crowd if they were psyched to see Thom Yorke’s new band, the Smile. One last time, the guitars and drums search for curious ways to complement Casablancas’ filtered crooning, but it falls flat. “That’s all I got, I let the song play out,” he sings, “But at the end, must let all songs die.” Amen.
