Reality Awaits

Two decades after their debut, The Strokes were more popular than they ever were, fueled by an enormous Gen Z audience who viewed 2020’s excellent The New Abnormal as the artistic equal to the group’s classic early work. 

That album is used as a jumping-off point for Reality Awaits, the most experimental and murky record The Strokes have ever made. In other words, this is The Strokes’ art-rock album. It sometimes resembles Stranded-era Roxy Music in both musical style and approach, illustrating this most clearly in the funereal grandeur of “Psycho Shit.” Even ostensibly lighter moments like “Lonely in the Future” and “Going Shopping,” a darkly ironic commentary on consumer culture with a cheerful surface, are both haunting and hooky. Reality Awaits is The Strokes at their most difficult and ambitious, and at its frequent best it resonates as strongly as anything the band has done.