The Strokes are getting (way) weirder with age

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Set us as preferred Twenty-five years after “Is This It,” the Strokes are as big as they’ve ever been — and not just among old heads eager to relive the wasted glamour of the early-2000s garage rock revival.Go to a Strokes gig these days — they’re playing arenas and headlining festivals like next month’s Just Like Heaven in Pasadena — and you’ll find teens and twentysomethings in the audience; open up Instagram and there’s frontman Julian Casablancas dispensing viral hot takes on the New York City subway.

On Spotify, the band’s most-streamed song isn’t the Giuliani-era “Last Nite” but “The Adults Are Talking,” which came out at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic — a feat of cultural endurance unmatched by any of the Strokes’ Gen X or millennial peers.So what better time to drop a new album full of arcane jokes, baffling vocal affects and light conspiracy theorizing?The group’s first LP since 2020’s Grammy-winning “The New Abnormal,” “Reality Awaits” is easily the nuttiest entry in the Strokes’ catalog, with a spooky opening track, “Psycho S—,” in which Casablancas, his voice slathered in AutoTune, ushers the listener “past the hall of judging dead into the bed of nightly dread.” (Sexy!) “Falling Out of Love” is a lilting robo-country ballad about dancing alone under acid rain; “Liar’s Remorse” is a voice-and-guitar lament about submitting to artificial intelligence that Casablancas croons for some reason in a terrible Caribbean accent.Entertainment & Arts Then there’s “Lonely in the Future,” in which Casablancas name-drops John Legend and Josh Groban, appears to ding Harry Styles for cribbing the beat from the Strokes’ “Hard to Explain” and informs Anthony Fantano, the popular internet music critic, that he “would not recognize art in ...