I’ve had to check three times that we’re still in 2026, glancing at my watch, my phone, and the calendars my father still hangs up at his house. Given the controversy over Auto-Tune on the Strokes’ seventh album, I thought we had stepped back in time. For instance to 2007, a year before Kanye West released ‘808s & Heartbreak’ and the era of Bon Iver’s debut. For instance to 2012, a year before The Strokes proved they were here to have fun with a single as wild as ‘One Way Trigger’. The same era when Julian Casablancas blew up streaming platforms with that marvel called ‘Instant Crush’ alongside Daft Punk.
Not to mention the three records released by The Voidz, Casablancas’s side project. Wasn’t his introduction with that track named ‘Human Sadness’ enough to indicate his tastes in the twenty-first century?
The absurdity has come to the point where in this half-decade people have accepted that ‘The New Abnormal’, the Strokes’ latest album to date, is a new classic for the band, having become the favorite of Generation Z, with astronomical numbers. And on that album Auto-Tune and voices stretched to the screeching are used on tracks like ‘Eternal Summer’! What did we expect in 2026 from this group? ‘Is This It?’ Seriously?
The question, at most, will be whether Auto-Tune is used excessively, appropriately, enriching, or redundant. Julian Casablancas tends to push it into dramatic, suffocating territories, almost as a lament, and it’s true that in ‘Falling out of Love’ he may have overdone it. But it’s not a matter of Auto-Tune. It’s a matter of the song stretching to six and a half minutes without delivering one of its best progressions. The climax created at the end of ‘Psycho Shit’ is much better, which brings us to the album’s thematic content.
Because there should be more discussion about how ‘Reality Awaits’ is a fairly political album by the Strokes, highly critical of the times we live in. Mysteriously, it seems your algorithm cares far less about that. The single ‘Going Shopping’ talks about how we retreat into consumerism, about beings who feel ‘above the law’ and about how we’ve lost sensitivity toward our neighbor. In relation to the album’s title, it raises: ‘The worse reality becomes, the less you want to hear about it / Solidarity can be hard when you have so many cool things to lose’.
In that vein, the ballad ‘Liar’s Remorse’ introduces a line about someone too dependent on AI, and especially the aforementioned ‘Psycho Shit’ is clearly directed at someone: ‘you kill your prey without moving from your nest / from behind a desk / you’re a dishonorable, gutless psychopath.’ Casablancas’s lyrics are crystal clear there—other times they are more obtuse—but what’s certain is that it was worth paying attention to what lay behind the much-trotted Auto-Tune.
Above all because Julian Casablancas remains capable of both entertaining and moving when he steps up. ‘Lonely in the Future’, the most ‘early Strokes’ song after that somewhat Jack White-like intro, is a cheeky defense of his legacy, with venomous jabs at Harry Styles (‘Dude kept the beat “As It Was”‘), The Weeknd (‘I like how you dress’ — i.e., ‘you copied me’) or Fantano (‘they told me the same thing you did twenty fucking years ago’). It’s a bit of a mood-killer that he stoops to replying to things after 25 years of a career, but the track still sounds vibrant. As does ‘Dine N’Dash’—with its evocative keyboards—or ‘Going to Babble On’.
On the more emotional side, there is ‘Liar’s Remorse’, supported barely by Albert Hammond Jr.’s electric guitar, urging someone to love (‘you have no love because you don’t want to suffer / you don’t want to suffer because you lack confidence’) and generally the sense of nostalgia that comes through lyrics and melodies for various reasons. In ‘Going Shopping’ there’s a revealing line where Julian reveals they’ve already called him ‘old’; in ‘Tyrants of the Mellow Moon’ he asks ‘has it arrived too late’.
This last song doesn’t quite unpack its Radiohead-inspired roots, leaving a sense of something unfinished, but that’s how the Strokes’ albums have been since ‘Angles’ (2011)… or even earlier. You can dive into the album, especially through ‘Lonely in the Future’, or you can keep spinning your lifelong favorites. They’ve been singing it for three decades: Take It or Leave It.
