For more than two decades, the Strokes have occupied a rare place in rock music, influencing countless bands while refusing to act like the old guard. Now the New York rock n’ roll heroes are back with Reality Awaits, their long-awaited seventh studio album and first full-length since 2020's Grammy-winning The New Abnormal.

Produced by Rick Rubin, Reality Awaits was born far from the streets of Manhattan. The band decamped to a mountaintop in Costa Rica, where Rubin transformed the recording sessions into something closer to a company retreat than a traditional studio experience. His vision was simple: set the band up outdoors and let nature become part of the performance.

"They're doing a concert for the ocean," Rubin recalled of the sessions, describing days spent recording in the open air. "They didn't want to leave. It was the best experience."

That sense of freedom flows through the album's nine new songs. While the Strokes remain rooted in the lean and mean guitars, seemingly effortless cool, and sense of melody that made them one of the bigger bands of the early 2000s, Reality Awaits feels less like a welcome return to familiar territory. Finished in actual studios around the world after the Costa Rica experience wrapped, the record finds a nice balance between a polished finish and the band's unmistakable looseness.

The first hint of what was to come was "Going Shopping," an offbeat, hook-filled single accompanied by a playful music video that tips its hat to Paul Simon's legendary "You Can Call Me Al." To fill the Chevy Chase role, the band recruited the great Walton Goggins, who interrupted filming in the Canary Islands to join Julian Casablancas and company in Tenerife for the video shoot. The result is equal parts absurdist comedy and Strokes + Goggins charm. Follow-up single "Falling Out Of Love" revealed another side of the album, bringing bittersweet melodies to the band's signature guitar interplay. Its live debut on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert reaffirmed that, even after years away, the Strokes can still dish it out on stage.

Since Is This It helped take garage rock into the mainstream in 2001, the Strokes have managed to try new things while still staying the course, letting each record to capture a different chapter of the band's evolution and be its own thing. Reality Awaits continues that tradition, not as an exercise in reliving past glories but as proof that one of the 21st century's most influential rock bands still has the fire burning inside.