Reality Awaits
The Strokes · Indie Rock
“You did not need to reinvent yourselves, you just needed to sound like you still wanted to be here, and on the best moments you finally do.”
Six years after The New Abnormal, The Strokes return with Reality Awaits, their seventh album, produced by Rick Rubin and trailed by two singles that suggest a band finally relaxing into being a band again. Going Shopping is loose, melodic and summery, Falling out of Love has that effortless jangle the imitators never quite cracked, and Albert Hammond Jr. promised a record looser than its predecessor. On the early evidence, he is telling the truth. The catch, as ever with The Strokes, is the difference between loose and lazy. This is a band that changed music in 2001 and has spent two decades being graded against their own first eleven songs, a curse no amount of Rick Rubin incense can lift. Track titles like Psycho Shit and Going to Babble On suggest a group having fun, which is lovely, but fun has never been the question. The question is whether Julian Casablancas still wants it more than he wants to sound like he does not care. What the singles deliver is comfort, the warm familiarity of a band that knows exactly what it is. What they do not yet deliver is the jolt, the sense that this had to exist. Reality Awaits may well be a very good Strokes album. Whether it is an essential one is the gap they have been trying to close since roughly 2003.
When The Strokes lock into a groove, almost nobody does it better, and the two singles prove the chemistry is intact and the melodies are still effortless. Rick Rubin knows how to get out of a great band's way, and a looser, happier Strokes is a genuinely lovely thing to have back.
Graded on the world's harshest curve
“This is the seventh album from a band whose debut Is This It still defines them, and every release since gets measured against 2001 rather than on its own terms.”
The fix Lean all the way into the looser, happier identity the singles hint at instead of chasing the ghost of the first record.
Loose can shade into coasting
“Albert Hammond Jr. promised a record looser than The New Abnormal, and titles like Psycho Shit and Going to Babble On read as a band amusing itself first.”
The fix Keep the looseness but aim at least a couple of songs squarely at the jugular, the way the early singles always did.
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