Julian Casablancas isn't here to save rock and roll. According to Rolling Stone's review of Reality Awaits, the Strokes frontman seems almost indifferent to the entire proposition—which is the most punk-rock move they've made in years.
The album is a wild ride: thrilling one moment, utterly inscrutable the next. Reality Awaits finds Casablancas, now in his late forties, contending with late-capitalism anxiety, urban ennui, and the 2026 problem of having too much to lose. On "Going Shopping," he delivers lines like "Solidarity can be difficult when you've got cool stuff to lose" and "We're building castles from the bones of dead trees"—then undercuts himself with "I want to be a seven-foot starfish." It shouldn't work. But it does.
The Strokes are having a cultural moment that seemed impossible a decade ago. Their 2020 album The New Abnormal produced "The Adults Are Talking," which now has as many Spotify streams as their generation-defining "Last Nite," per Rolling Stone. They're not relics. A completely new audience of "young olds and old youngs," as the review puts it, has discovered them. That kind of cross-generational pull is rarer than a successful reunion tour, especially when you're releasing new material.
Reality Awaits isn't a cynical cash-in. The band—guitarist Albert Hammond Jr., Nick Valensi on guitar, drummer Fab Moretti, and the rest—sounds genuinely interested in something other than "bangers." On "Going to Babble On," Casablancas frets about modern life over neo-New Wave perfection that few bands can match, building to a spandex-soaked 80s guitar solo that feels both nostalgic and cathartic. That's not a band phoning it in.
The risk is that ambitious-but-bizarre doesn't always translate to commercial success. Indie bands of The Strokes' vintage are walking a tightrope: their core fans want them to evolve, but the casual listener wants greatest-hits nostalgia. Reality Awaits clearly leans into the former. Whether that resonates globally—and crucially, with the Indian indie and alternative music audience that's grown exponentially—remains to be seen. But a band in their mid-forties genuinely grappling with the absurdity of modern existence is worth listening to, starfish lyrics and all.
