Reality Awaits: The Moment of Truth Has Arrived for The Strokes

 

The Strokes are heirs to the cursed lineage of New York bands like The Velvet Underground, The Ramones, Television, and Sonic Youth. Fragments of these bands live eternally in the group’s DNA. It must be noted that, starting with their second album, the band began diversifying their sound in unexpected and interesting ways. They sought an identity of their own that, at times, proved impossible to reach. That search placed them in a complex and fascinating position.

There was a great deal of The Velvet Underground in their first record, and some of The Stooges. Later, the guitars of Albert Hammond Jr. and Nick Valensi began taking elements from the old Television albums and the experimental pop wanderings of Sonic Youth, with ever more detours into the world of psychedelia. To these influences others were added in unexpected fashion: Ariel Pink, The Doors, Pearl Jam, Joy Division, New Order, and the nostalgia of Auto Tune in Julian Casablancas’s vocals.

The New Abnormal from 2020 could well have been the equivalent of The Velvet Underground’s third album, the one in which the band left behind distortion and noise and seemed to be playing inside a closet. Here Rick Rubin came in and stripped away every excess from the group’s sound. He reduced them to their sonic minimum. It is an artistic triumph for a band that many believed lost or gone forever. Twenty-five years after Is This It comes Reality Awaits. It is a memorable return from a band that refuses to stop evolving. They demonstrate an identity that is both their own and complex. Rubin produced once again and set the band outdoors so they would play as if they were giving a concert.

“Psycho Shit” opens the album. Many will feel uncomfortable with Casablancas’s use of AutoTune and with Nick Valensi’s synthesizers, which now rival the guitars. Yet these are tools already employed by Cher, Daft Punk, Thom Yorke, and Kanye West to evoke nostalgia within a pop music context. Nostalgia is great when used creatively, as a foundation for innovation and provocation, and not as a longing in which one remains trapped and repeats the same thing over and over. That seems to be the journey the band is on this time: creative and even experimental nostalgia that provokes. Let us leave garage rock to Charli XCX for the moment (although The Strokes would seem the most suitable candidates to make an album called Music, Fashion, Film). What these Strokes deliver is a dark, decadent, and nostalgic experimental pop. It is something like the album The Rolling Stones should have given us a few weeks ago.

“Dine N Dash” is a post punk piece that sits on the bridge between Joy Division and Sonic Youth. Casablancas sounds a little like Lou Reed at times. “Lonely in the Future” feels like one of those hard, danceable tracks from the later Queens of the Stone Age records. The rhythms of Fabrizio Moretti and Nikolai Fraiture contribute warm, mature sounds drawn from late 70s yacht rock that occasionally reach the new wave of the 80s. Then it transforms into one of those danceable Velvet Underground pieces (“I Can’t Stand It”) or Lou Reed numbers (“Sally Can’t Dance,” “Disco Mystic”). “Falling Out of Love” at moments recalls “Bring It On Home to Me” by The Animals, with a touch of Leonard Cohen. “Going to Babble On” is pure 80s. “Going Shopping” is a strange mix of The Velvet Underground, The Cure, and The Rolling Stones (with drums that always recall Ringo Starr) that, for some inexplicable reason, works, plus a nod to the emptiness that comes from consumerism. “The Fruits of Conquest” is pure Stones. It is proof that Rubin ought to be on The Rolling Stones’ radar for a final anthology album (Rubin produced Mick Jagger’s best solo record in the 90s, Wandering Spirit). “Tyrants of the Mellow Moon” says it all. It sums it all up.

The Strokes are music. Yes. But they have also become a state of mind. Their music transcends individual tracks or songs. It is about creating overwhelming moods. About altering our mood. And in that sense, Reality Awaits is a welcome triumph.