The Strokes' new album, Reality Awaits, seems purpose built to annoy the widest possible audience, a bit like the Ferrari Luce. It won't win over many new fans, and it won't convince a good chunk of the longtime ones either.
Six years after The New Abnormal, anticipation around Reality Awaits was enormous. With the single Going Shopping, the band itself had already taken care of lowering expectations, or at least made clear right away which direction the new album would take.
Comparing the nearly 50 year old Strokes to the ones from 2001 and 2003 simply makes no sense anymore. Some trends always come back, or never really leave, like baggy trousers or American bombings in the Middle East, but that historical moment rested on dynamics completely different from those of 2026.
Today's Strokes had to decide whether to become a caricature of themselves, maybe with celebratory Is This It tours and leather jackets fit for newly divorced boomers, or to act like Strokes and embrace the passing of time, even at the risk of not being liked. They chose the second option, clearly.
Reality Awaits is packed with autotune, but anyone surprised by that choice probably never noticed how heavily Julian Casablancas has used vocal effects on nearly every one of his albums.
The fact that the distorted, compressed sound of his voice on Is This It was celebrated, while the autotune on Reality Awaits gets torn apart, doesn't change the substance: it's still an artistic use of a tool that alters the voice.
Either way, the sound of Reality Awaits reminded us so much of Daft Punk that we found no better way to rank the songs than this: from the most Daft Punk to the most Strokes.
9 - Falling out of Love
6 minutes and 20 seconds of song, a sort of odyssey for the attention span of new generations (but also of old ones, worn down by the internet). Daft Punk at 110%, it sounds like a Random Access Memory demo, a difficult track you come to love once you read the lyrics carefully.
8 - Psycho Shit
More Daft Punk or more Radiohead's Exit Music (For a Film)? A good question, made even trickier by the echoes of Pink Floyd's early The Gnome and See Emily Play that surface in the second, unsettling part of the track. The hardest song on the album, and also the first one: from here, it's all downhill.
7 - Tyrants of the Mellow Moon
The album's last track, maybe its manifesto too. Either way, quite a lot of Daft Punk in the sound.
So we go for one more ride
And that's okay 'cause I did my time
But now I wait for another chance
When I will take everything I can
Here we are for the final time
And I hope you say that I made you laugh
Oh, I tried to make things right
Though it's hard, maybe I can for just one night
Though I never say the same thing twice
I will sigh one more time
6 - Going Shopping
Listening to the whole album, it's hard to understand why Going Shopping was chosen as the single, as the calling card after 6 years of silence. It's not the best track, not the one pushing furthest into experimentation, not the one most tied to the Strokes' history. Which is exactly why it probably was chosen as the single.
5 - Liar's Remorse
A song that doesn't resemble anything else, except for an opening that recalls Stairway To Heaven and fades into an almost reggae feel within 30 seconds. While you wait for the drums to arrive, you stay glued to Julian's phrases dancing over an all too essential backing track. Here too, the words push the song to another level, though not as much as the outro, which takes all that waiting for the drums and resolves it in an ending that leaves you stunned. A truly surprising track, one that starts with zero expectations, gets better minute by minute, and ends up becoming one of your favorites.
4 - Dine N'Dash
Here we start entering territory populated by songs that wouldn't have seemed too out of place on any other Strokes album.
3 - The Fruits of Conquest
It's not in first place only because it's more Rolling Stones than Strokes. A bit of Gimme Shelter, a bit of Mess It Up, a bit of Mick Jagger in Miracle Worker.
2 - Lonely in the Future
Reality Awaits can be loved or hated, as said it seems like an album made to divide, but on Lonely in the Future there's little to argue about: it's a stunning track.
There is innovation, yes, but it still feels like a song that jumped out of 2001 and disguised itself perfectly to fit 2026. It would be in first place if not for that autotune drift reminding us that no, it's not a 2001 track.
1 - Going to Babble On
It brings back Threat of Joy and Someday, with a few echoes of Phoenix. For fans of the more classic Strokes, this will be the best track on the album. If someone told us it came from any other album by the band, we'd have no trouble believing it.