The Strokes’ seventh album is finally here. The highly anticipated Reality Awaits hasn’t had the most desirable rollout in the world, with its two previews drawing widespread criticism, mostly aimed at Julian Casablancas’ vocal effects. A bit of good and bad: the record is full of autotune, but also of tracks that hit hard, such as ‘Lonely In The Future’. It’s the Song of the Day.
The first ten seconds of this track are a total ruse, but we soon recognize our beloved New York band. Totally in form, too. Amid the unmistakable guitar interplay, Casablancas swaps the word ‘Someday’ for ‘yesterday’ as he sings about everything he’s done in the past. It’s like when an older person watches a kid do something for the first time and feels compelled to remind them that he already did it “twenty damn years ago.”
‘Lonely In The Future’ tackles one of the central themes of ‘Reality Awaits’: nostalgia. It does so by mentioning trends (and its own songs) like ‘YOLO’, artists such as John Legend or Josh Groban, and concrete memories, like “the first date we had.” It also ventures a bit of beef at Fantano: “Stick to the technical, but you wouldn’t recognize art at any age.”
The same theme runs through the sweetly tender ‘Going To Babble On’, where Casablancas sings about “starting over,” or ‘Falling out of Love’, which slots much better into the overall tracklist. This one has a bit of everything, and while it isn’t as instantly catchy as ‘The New Abnormal’, which will remain a Gen Z favorite, it does feel like a more cohesive project. Still, many of these songs are clear growers.
The album’s sound and the structure of the tracks, fluctuating in ‘Tyrants of The Mellow Moon’ or ‘The Fruits of Conquest’, are clearly influenced by The Voidz. The autotune, which is sure to provoke a few headaches, isn’t present on every track, but when it is, it isn’t exactly subtle. The experimentation from Casablancas’s side project suits The Strokes well, with each track seeming unpredictable and capable of darting in a new direction in a matter of tenths of a second.
Still, ‘Reality Awaits’ remains a record wholly tilted toward pop. Much more than what the opening cut suggests, the eerie ‘Psycho Shit’. In this one, Casablancas sings about someone who kills their prey “from the nest” or “behind a table”: “You have neither honor nor guts,” he declares.
The Strokes have complemented their trip down memory lane by dusting off the documentary title ‘In Transit’, released in 2004 and built from footage from the European leg of ‘Is This It’. On the eve of the 25th anniversary of their debut, the group has uploaded on YouTube ‘In Transit: Part II’, edited with footage of them recording ‘Reality Awaits’ in Costa Rica.
