Album Review: The Strokes - "Reality Awaits"
Reality Awaits, the new seventh album from The Strokes, is ugly, garish, and appalling. It's a truly bad album that doesn't deserve your time or energy.
The Strokes. You know them. I know them. We all know them. The classic New York indie rock band came out of the 2000's with a vengeance and a resilience that very few bands could even think to muster. 2001's Is This It and 2004's Room on Fire are timeless, certified classics, both having cemented the band as one of the most important rock bands of the 21st century. This of course creates a lot of heft and stress to whatever the band would do next. 2005's First Impressions of Earth is a hiccup that many of us remember as just being ok, while 2011's Angles is a mixed bag to many, despite myself thinking it's actually pretty darn good. 2013's Comedown Machine is a lazy, bland contractual obligation of a record that many fans would choose to forget, including myself. 2020's The New Abnormal, the band's last record, provides a welcoming return to form and despite its numerous shortcomings, it's actually pretty decent and is not nearly as bad as I originally thought it would be. In between albums, we've received some projects from the frontman Julian Casablancas, under his own name and under his band The Voidz. The Voidz have become a peculiar point in the Strokes timeline, since Casablancas has toyed with the murky, garage heavy psychedelia of that band's work quite often over the years, more often than The Strokes these days. I've loved much of their work, even more so than later Strokes records, 2018's Virtue being a major highlight. But 2024's Like All Before You truly revealed what was under the foil that The Voidz seemed to wear coolly, and I've almost lost my faith in a Casablancas or Strokes project in the near future ever since.
Now that we've reached six years since The New Abnormal, The Strokes have reunited with bearded producer / gambling promoter / AI enthusiast Rick Rubin for a new album. Titled Reality Awaits, the band convened in Costa Rica to record their seventh studio album. The reality of Reality Awaits has fully arrived to me after my first listen, with the reality being that this album is a crock of shit. Reality Awaits is ugly, garish, appalling. It's boring. It's the slog of all slogs. The biggest crime that Reality Awaits commits is that it's a truly bad album that doesn't deserve your time or energy. The fact that this is a professionally produced studio album from a band as highly regarded as The Strokes is disappointing to say the least. It's awfulness comes at you in a variety of ways, but most notably it comes directly from the vocal department. Across the entirety of the record's forty-two minute runtime, Julian Casablancas' vocals are so drenched, or should I say flooded, in autotune that it's actual torture to listen to. I was going to write borderline torture here, but it's actual torture. They could be playing this to inmates in Guantanamo freaking Bay if they wanted to. They have literally committed torture within my eardrums. Numerous times! Unfortunately, I felt that I needed to listen to this record multiple times to prepare for this review. You're welcome, dear readers.
Don't get me wrong. I like some autotune when I hear it. When it's done properly, it can be great! There are excellent examples out there of autotuned singing that's applied correctly and tastefully onto songs. Discovery's LP is a great example. 100 gecs' 10,000 gecs is a great example (you don't have to tell me twice). Most recently, Charli XCX's new album is a fantastic example. Ironically, several Julian Casablancas songs are great examples! His vocals on Daft Punk's "Instant Crush"? Amazing! His vocals throughout The Voidz' Virtue? Awesome! So why, for the love of Christ Almighty himself, is the singing so fucking bad on Reality Awaits? I honestly have no idea. Maybe having too many yes men in the studio? Maybe having a literal "non producer" producer in the studio who's like, "I love those autotuned vocals! Yeah man, keep doing that!" while he strokes (no pun intended) his disgusting long ass beard as he sits back with his bare feet showing? I don't know man... but all I know is that the singing is one of the key reasons as to why this is one of the most horrendous albums I've heard in a long time.
If we ignore the singing for just a measly second, if we can possibly ignore it... the songs themselves don't exactly convince me otherwise. They come off as either half assed, boring, annoying, bland, or all at once. "Psycho Shit" starts the album off at a terrible pace, a five and a half minute torture chamber of moody, bland instrumentation that rises up in progression until my ears bleed. And don't get me started with the vocals, it's some of the worst on the entire record. The butt rock guitars chugging at the beginning of "Living In the Future" is eye roll inducing, along with the lazy lyrics and one liners. "Falling Out of Love" leaves me wanting to fall out of my seat and onto the floor after hearing this for six and a half minutes. The melodies and harmonies on "Liar's Remorse" are too annoying to even dissect in this review. "The Fruits of Conquest" may be the album's most challenging and difficult song to even listen to, with its ugly falsetto vocals and clashing instrumentation of bongos and slick guitar. It's surprising to hear that even with his vocals being not that coated in autotune on this track, it's still not a much needed reprieve that I desperately need. "Tyrants of the Mellow Moon" is a boring, long winded finale to a boring, long winded album.
There are a few inklings of moments that sound like the band we once loved if you squint hard enough. The core of the lead single "Going Shopping" is actually kind of fun if you somehow ignore the autotuned vocals, which is too big of a challenge even for me. The guitar licks of "Dine N' Dash" are actually pretty commendable even if they're run by the numbers for Hammond Jr. The grooves, drumming, and handclaps on "Going to Babble On" are cute and charming before you get to the sappy, lazily sung chorus. But all of this cannot justify the many mind-numbingly terrible choices that the band and company have decided to make with this album. Reality Awaits is what you come up with if you are a legacy band like The Strokes, who simply have absolutely nothing to say at this point in their careers and are only doing this to fulfill a contract obligation. Of course none of the band members want to piss off Julian Casablancas by simply kneeling to his absurd decision to sing entirely in warbled, messy, dumb autotune. Or who knows, maybe I'm giving the other band members way too much credit here? Maybe they're all in on this mess. Hey, Albert Hammond Jr. said it's their best album yet, one he wants to listen to over and over again. Anyways... this review's gone off the rails, but not as much as The Strokes have with Reality Awaits (ayooooo!). I'm tired, you're probably tired too, so I'll simply leave it at this. Please don't waste my time again, guys. Just next time, leave me with an email that has the subject line, "warbled, lazy autotuned garbage.." I would really appreciate it.
My Rating: 2 / 10
Favorite Songs: "Going Shopping"
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