The Strokes Made an Album for the Ocean and Forgot About Us

By KAZI Magazine Staff, May 26, 2026

The AutoTune on Julian Casablancas' voice in "Going Shopping" is not a glitch or an affectation. It is the sound of a band that no longer trusts its own instincts. The Strokes spent six years between The New Abnormal and Reality Awaits, and what they have returned with is an album that Albert Hammond Jr. calls the best thing they have ever done, recorded outdoors on a Costa Rican mountain with Rick Rubin producing, the band literally playing to the ocean. It sounds exactly like that. Breezy. Confident. Entirely frictionless. And that is the most damning thing you can say about a band that once made Is This It, an album that sounded like five people locked in a basement with no way out but through the speakers.

Rick Rubin has a way of making bands sound like themselves, which works beautifully when the band in question still has an adversarial relationship with the world. The Strokes in 2026 do not. Reality Awaits is polished in a way that suggests the producer's job was not to capture tension but to eliminate it. The jangly guitars on "Going Shopping" sit in the mix like they were placed there by committee. The synth work throughout the record is tasteful, which is another way of saying it never threatens to do anything unexpected. Casablancas has spent two decades refining his vocal distortion, from the blown-out lo-fi crunch of the early records to the more deliberate processing on Angles and Comedown Machine. Here, the AutoTune feels like a shortcut, a way to add texture without committing to a sonic decision. It is the kind of move you make when you are more interested in vibes than in making a statement.

The lineage matters here. The Strokes arrived in 2001 as the American answer to the Libertines and the Vines, a band that understood the Velvet Underground's lesson about minimalism but added the Cars' sense of economy. They were never a punk band, despite what the press kits said. They were a pop band in punk clothing, and that was the innovation. Room on sharp doubled down on that formula. First Impressions of Earth tried to expand it and collapsed under the weight. By the time Angles and Comedown Machine arrived, the band was openly splintering, with Casablancas pursuing The Voidz and Hammond pursuing solo records that were often more urgent than anything The Strokes were putting out. The New Abnormal in 2020 felt like a return, mostly because it was produced by Rubin and sounded like a band that had rediscovered the value of being in the same room. Reality Awaits sounds like they got too comfortable in that room and forgot why they went there in the first place.

The frustration is not that The Strokes have changed. It is that they have stopped changing. Nine tracks, forty minutes, not a single moment that suggests risk or discomfort. Hammond says the record is looser than The New Abnormal, and maybe it is, but loose is not the same as dangerous. Loose can mean relaxed. It can also mean unfocused. "Lonely in the Future" and "Liar's Remorse" are competent mid-tempo rock songs that would fit comfortably on any Strokes record from the past fifteen years, which is exactly the problem. There is no ceiling here, no moment where the band pushes past what they know they can do. The New Abnormal had "Ode to the Mets," a seven-minute closer that felt like the band acknowledging its own mortality. Reality Awaits has "Pros and Cons," which fades out like the end of a pleasant afternoon.

The Strokes played only six shows combined in 2024 and 2025, then announced a 2026 festival circuit that reads like a victory lap. Coachella. Bonnaroo. Outside Lands. Summer Sonic. Shaky Knees. These are not the venues of a band trying to prove something. These are the venues of a band that has already won and is now collecting the check. When they debuted "Going Shopping" at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in April, it was the only new song in the setlist. The rest was the hits. The Strokes have become a legacy act that occasionally releases new music, and Reality Awaits does nothing to challenge that narrative.

Rick Rubin told Joe Rogan in 2022 that the Costa Rica sessions were incredible, that the band did not want to leave. That tracks. Reality Awaits sounds like a band that found paradise and decided to stay there. The problem is that great rock records are not made in paradise. They are made in rooms with bad air conditioning and unresolved tension and the feeling that if you do not get this right, no one will care. The Strokes no longer operate under that pressure, and you can hear it in every carefully placed guitar line and every AutoTuned vocal and every decision that prioritizes comfort over confrontation. This is not a band that has run out of ideas. This is a band that has stopped demanding more of itself. And for a group that once reset the entire indie rock landscape, that is the saddest ending imaginable.