It always seems to be one step forward and two steps back with Julian Casablancas, doesn’t it? Indie rock pioneers The Strokes have had a long and fruitful career, full of as many beloved highs as disappointing lows: after 2020’s ‘The New Abnormal’ went over so well with the fans, it was to be expected that their next record would be underwhelming, to say the least. Fans’ prayers that Casablancas wouldn’t port The Voidz’ garish vocal pitch correction over to ‘Reality Awaits’ have gone unanswered— it is exactly as you feared.

We may as well address the elephant in the room from the off, because it’s sure to be the first thing that jumps out at you when you hit play on ‘Psycho Sh*t:’ dear lord, the use of pitch correction across this album is downright insufferable. For a band renowned for their endearing, rough-and-tumble sound that paved the way for indie rock as we know it today to sand off the rough edges of Casablancas’ voice like this is almost unthinkable— ‘Reality Awaits’ is only 42 minutes long, but by the time it’s over, you’ll have forgotten what a regular human voice is actually meant to sound like. There really is no conceivable excuse for this, a single decision that neuters the entire project. It’s distracting, it’s ugly, it’s pointless, and it ushers The Strokes down a dismally dark path across these nine tracks.

Truth be told, Casablancas’ vocals aren’t really the nail in the album’s coffin, but a symptom of a larger, more insidious problem: throughout their newest release, The Strokes barely even sound like a human band! On a cut like ‘Falling out of Love’ or ‘Tyrants of the Mellow Moon,’ every fluttering guitar line and warbling keyboard accompaniment has been stripped of all character, like each one was spat out by some unfeeling AI model— you really have to question whether Fabrizio Moretti bothered to turn up to the studio at all, or if every simplistic drum pattern you’ll find on ‘Reality Awaits’ was pulled from the stock GarageBand library. There’s more energy in the first thirty seconds of ‘The Adults Are Talking’ off of ‘The New Abnormal’ than you’ll find anywhere across this album, which feels tailor made to disguise the very band that made it.

It should come as absolutely no surprise, then, that the brightest spots on offer here come when The Strokes actually let themselves be… y’know, The Strokes. You can hear Casablancas’ voice breaking even underneath the heavy vocal processing on ‘Psycho Sh*t,’ adding to a track that manages to build into a fairly ominous and thunderous opener for the project: it’s an odd choice to kick off such a relaxed record like this, but we’ll take it. Most of the project’s best material is clustered in its first half, with the easy-going grooves of ‘Dine N’Dash’ and ‘Going to Babble On’ harkening back to the group’s classic material (which is a welcome nod, even if it does feel like low-hanging fruit). Even ‘Lonely in the Future’ will probably get you nodding along, despite its painfully blunt lyrical motifs— the song manages to be quite fun, if you can look past its god awful presentation.

That’s not to say that every song on ‘Reality Awaits’ is some indie rock gem, hidden beneath a sea of artificial textures: no no, dear reader, quite the opposite. Some time in the last six years, The Strokes simply forget how to end a song— how else could you possibly explain the wandering structure of ‘Falling out of Love,’ the irritating solo that closes out lead single ‘Going Shopping’ or the incessant repetition of “I’m a leech” on ‘The Fruits of Conquest.’ For a band who’re singing about such bleak themes as isolation, disconnection and the fragile state of the modern world, Casablancas and company sure isn’t showing much emotion on this one. The advertiser-friendly pleasantness of ‘Tyrants of the Mellow Moon’ and glorified interlude ‘Liar’s Remorse’ is banal at best, and more often than not utterly laughable.

The Strokes’ latest work may bear the word ‘reality’ in its title, but we’re still waiting to hear something real from any of these nine tracks— maybe heart, soul and some decent vocal performances ‘await’ us on the next album. Right from the moment ‘Going Shopping’ dropped as a single, fans were worried for what this record would sound like, and they were right to. Aside from some cheery highlights here-and-there (and even then, they aren’t much to write home about), ‘Reality Awaits’ is like a bad joke we’re not in on.