The Strokes: Reality Awaits review – a perfect marriage of mayhem and melody on their best album in years

(RCA/Cult)
Allying the crackpot strangeness of Julian Casablancas’ side projects with his band’s gift for pop minimalism, the New Yorkers are on playful, joyous form

Here’s a sentence no old-head Strokes fan wants to hear: to understand Reality Awaits, the stalwart NYC group’s seventh album and first in six years, you first have to understand the Voidz. Julian Casablancas’s other band has been taking up more and more of his time in recent years, much to the chagrin of fans who may have dipped into the group’s painfully, awkwardly proggy 2014 debut Tyranny and decided to just let the old legend have his fun (away from their own speakers, of course). Anyone who decided to listen further will have found that the Voidz have turned into a great, crowd-pleasing, safely experimental zone for Casablancas to pull out some of the most energised, goofy work of his career. If you’re thinking I come to this guy for cool, not goof, I don’t know what to tell you: this is a man who spends interviews discussing his theories about ancient Sumerian culture.

The 2018 Voidz record Virtue is a high point of Casablancas’s entire catalogue: a gentle stylistic mixed bag that covers winsome pop-rock, yacht rock, bedroom pop and much more. That album seemed to clear the decks for the Strokes’ last record, 2020’s The New Abnormal, on which they sounded the most like their 2001 selves since Is This It. That album is now the definitive Strokes album for gen Z – go to any Strokes show and watch the younger contingent light up during The Adults Are Talking – but it didn’t presage a long-term back-to-basics route for Casablancas and co. On Reality Awaits, by sheer force of will, he fuses the crackpot strangeness and, ahem, fondness for AutoTune of the Voidz with the Strokes’ minimalism and pop melodicism.
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