The Strokes - Reality Awaits [Indie Exclusive]

Six years after The New Abnormal, The Strokes return with their seventh studio album and a familiar collaborator behind the board. Reality Awaits reunites the band with Rick Rubin, who produced their Grammy-winning last record, and this time the sessions carried them all the way to Costa Rica. The result pulls in two directions at once: back toward the lean, wiry immediacy that made their name, and further into the moodier, synth-tinged territory the band has spent the last decade mapping.

Across nine songs, from the coiled "Psycho Shit" and "Dine N'Dash" to the closing "Tyrants of the Mellow Moon," the album balances jagged garage-rock energy with the group's more atmospheric instincts. Lead singles "Going Shopping" and "Falling Out of Love" show off both sides, with Julian Casablancas leaning into AutoTune as a stylistic tool rather than a crutch, bending his voice into the record's stranger corners. It is the sound of a band still willing to upend expectations rather than coast on a formula they invented.

More than twenty years into one of indie rock's defining catalogs, The Strokes remain restless, and Reality Awaits extends that streak without repeating itself. It is a record that sounds both unmistakably like this band and unlike anything else they have made.

This indie-exclusive edition is pressed on black ice glitter vinyl via RCA / Cult Records. A striking pressing of a long-awaited return, and one worth grabbing while the exclusive lasts.