The Strokes Break a Six-Year Silence June 26 With 'Reality Awaits,' Made With Rick Rubin

The Strokes release their seventh album, Reality Awaits, on June 26. It is their first record since 2020's The New Abnormal, which makes this a six-year gap, the longest of their career. Rick Rubin produced it. They cut it in Costa Rica. And right up until the clock rolls over, the only piece of it anyone outside the band has heard is one single, "Going Shopping," which has been sitting on streaming since April.

That is a strange way to put out a major rock album in 2026. It is also completely on brand for a band that has spent twenty-five years treating the promotional cycle like something that happens to other people.

The rollout nobody asked for

The campaign started on April 6, when the band posted a teaser built around a Nissan 300ZX with the line "In the flesh, it's even sexier," followed by the album title and a summer release window. The same day, they mailed cassette tapes of "Going Shopping" to 100 fans who had handed over their addresses to the band's SMS list the week before. Then they walked out and played the song live for the first time at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. The next morning the single hit streaming for everyone else, along with the cover art: a Johann Rashid piece built on Richard Prince's 1989 photograph Untitled (Cowboy).

Cassettes, a sports car, and a single show. No festival of pre-release singles, no countdown. For a band this size, sitting on eight of nine songs until release night is a flex.

What is actually on it

Rubin's fingerprints go back further than the announcement. He mentioned recording with the Strokes in Costa Rica as far back as a 2022 appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast, so this thing has been in some form of motion for years. It runs nine tracks:

Eight of those titles are still a black box. The Strokes have never been a band that buries you in material, but going into release night with one known quantity out of nine is unusual even for them.

The one song we have

"Going Shopping" is the tell, for now. The guitars are wiry and angular, zig-zagging licks over a loose, light groove, and Julian Casablancas runs his vocals through Auto-Tune harder than usual, which is saying something for him. Critics who covered the single in April leaned on the same words: jaunty, kinetic, deceptively offhand. Atwood Magazine framed it as the band chasing the overstimulation of modern life. Stereogum clocked the "gratuitous Auto-Tune, even by Julian Casablancas' standards."

None of that is new ground for the Strokes. They have been folding synths and processed vocals into the garage-rock chassis since Comedown Machine in 2013, and The New Abnormal leaned into gloss. "Going Shopping" pushes a little further into the bright, plasticky end of that. If the rest of Reality Awaits sounds like its single, this is a loose, playful record rather than a grand comeback statement. Whether that is what Rubin was after, or whether he saved the heavier swings for the songs nobody has heard, is the actual question going into tonight.

The tour is already rolling

The band did not wait for the album to start playing these shows. The Reality Awaits tour opened June 12 at Bonnaroo and runs into October. The North American leg wraps September 20 at the Sea.Hear.Now festival in Asbury Park, New Jersey, before the band heads to Europe for dates including London's The O2, Paris' Accor Arena, and Amsterdam's Ziggo Dome, then on to Japan for Summer Sonic. Support across the run includes Thundercat, Cage the Elephant, Hamilton Leithauser, Fat White Family, Alex Cameron, and ÖLÜM. Tickets started around $90.

Reviews land when the record does. The thing worth watching is simple: after six years and a producer who tends to strip bands down to what they actually are, did the Strokes make a record that needed Rick Rubin, or one that just took this long to finish.