The Strokes: Reality Awaits Album Review – Warungku Terkini

Lately, Casablancas has been trying hard to be heard, but he’s incapable of expressing a political opinion without ironic padding. Anyone expecting a Rage Against the Machine turn after the Strokes’ anti-imperialist 2026 Coachella performance of “Oblivius” should recall that Casablancas joked to some Oxford students a couple months later that he thought the bold agitprop stage design would 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” came only after he excoriated voice memos and modern cars. Deeply aware of the inseparability of medium and the message, Casablancas rues the internet’s flattening effect on communication while encouraging you to Use This Sound. Reality Awaits sits inside that tension, fully aware of the bit, both sonically and lyrically. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it results in the Strokes’ loosest, funniest, and best album since before Facebook launched—which, sure, given the wildly varying quality of the band’s last four albums, feels like damning with faint praise. But it’s also a welcome acknowledgement that the Strokes finally seem comfortable dovetailing their festival-headlining elder-statesmen status with Casablancas’ desire to meet the techno-political moment on his terms.

Casablancas’ tongue-in-cheek radicalism resonates with Gen Z, who are increasingly intolerant of U.S. imperialism—and who generated a fresh era for the band by meming the anti-authoritarian lockdown-era single “The Adults Are Talking” into the Strokes’ most-streamed song. The band elaborates their new shtick on “The Fruits of Conquest,” the first half of which is slinky and confident, sounding like the Strokes’ early 2000s contemporaries Spoon, with Casablancas growling, “They don’t obey, so we won’t obey.” Then, as the second half grows darker and more self-effacing, he moans “I’m a leech,” over and over, letting his trademark self-doubt overwhelm the song for a minute. Close your eyes and it’s easy to imagine a sea of festival attendees who were born after First Impressions of Earth chanting both phrases with equal fervor, or constructing new TikTok rabbit warrens out of them. Grotesque impulses pervade the album, like how on “Dine N’Dash” he worms his way toward 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 best evocation of its deconstructed cigarette ad cover art.

But of course, the Strokes can only experiment so much: Though Casablancas would prefer to minimize this fact, they’re as much a reliable brand as a band, having taken full ownership of a sound that, ironically, itself once felt like an uncanny synthesis of the 1976-1982 dance/punk moment. So hearing slight variations on their sonic signature in 2026—tight guitar harmonizing, quick downstrumming, a disco band’s rhythm section, Casablancas’ arty hangdog moue—can feel like the Strokes covering the Strokes. On Reality, “Going to Babble On” and especially “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 through pop culture references like Ezra Koenig, namedropping the liberal U.S. foreign policy critic Chris Hedges, confusing Josh Groban and John Legend, and licking shots 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 much at his record industry bosses as the global power bloc. Either way, his stylish exhaustion reveals itself each time he croons that he’s “starting again.”