The Strokes – Reality Awaits

The Strokes – Reality Awaits

After six years away from the album format, The Strokes return with Reality Awaits, their highly anticipated follow-up to 2020's Grammy-winning The New Abnormal. Produced by longtime collaborator Rick Rubin, the record finds the New York quintet continuing to explore the tension between their familiar garage-rock sound and increasingly adventurous production.

Recorded initially in Costa Rica, with additional sessions taking place around the world, Reality Awaits brings together Julian Casablancas, Nick Valensi, Albert Hammond Jr., Nikolai Fraiture and Fabrizio Moretti. The album marks another chapter in a career that helped define the sound of early-2000s indie rock.

Rather than simply revisiting the stripped-down guitar sound of Is This It, the band leans into stranger electronic textures, unconventional arrangements, synth-driven passages and Casablancas' increasingly distinctive vocal treatments. There's still plenty of the band's signature interplay between interlocking guitars and loose, infectious rhythms, but the production gives the songs room to wander into unexpected territory.

The album's rollout began with “Going Shopping,” an offbeat, electronically treated single that immediately signaled the band wasn't interested in playing it safe. “Falling Out of Love” followed, offering another glimpse of the record's more melodic and reflective side.

Track Listing

SIDE A

  1. Psycho Shit

  2. Dine N'Dash

  3. Lonely in the Future

  4. Falling out of Love

SIDE B

  1. Going to Babble On

  2. Going Shopping

  3. Liar's Remorse

  4. The Fruits of Conquest

  5. Tyrants of the Mellow Moon