Julian Casablancas has always been fond of a little vocal processing, particularly with his side project the Voidz, but even his work with his main band, the Strokes, has seen him employing some subtle vocal effects. On the group’s seventh studio album and first is six years, Reality Awaits, the baked-in digital glitches and artifacts are front and center in a way that seems designed to command listeners’ attention, if not their annoyance.
The contorted sound of Casablancas’s processed vocals is merely irritating on tracks like the funky “Lonely in the Future” and the exuberant “Going Shopping,” but it becomes egregious on the album’s slower, moodier songs. The falsetto vocal melody of the sprawling ballad “Falling Out of Love” is lovely, but Cacasblancas’s vocals are otherwise smothered in Auto-Tune. There’s an admirable sense of human feeling in the song’s composition—from Nikolai Fraiture’s nimble, Beatles-esque bass to Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr.’s dreamy guitar harmonizing—yet Casablancas inexplicably sounds like malfunctioning robot for the entirety of the track.
If the effect were just on that song’s discordant bridge, which is tacked onto the end, it might have served a similar function as the processing of John Lennon’s voice in the second half of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which perfectly complements the trippiness of the lyrics and provides another sonic color to an already alluring piece of music. But the fact that all of Casablancas’s vocals on “Falling Out of Love” are augmented in this way speaks to its arbitrariness. The tenderness inherent in lyrics like “I’m fine for the first time” and “Hollywood here I come” is lost, the message obscured by its presentation.
Reality Awaits will probably be doomed to be remembered as the Strokes’s “Auto-Tune album.” Surely it won’t be remembered for its songs. “Going to Babble,” as its title would suggest, never seems to find the point, while “The Fruits of Conquest,” despite its deliciously sleazy groove, fizzles out without having left much of an impression beyond the pleasure of listening to its syncopated guitar rhythms and off-beat bongo drum hits.
Although the album’s origins stretch back to at least 2022, the finished product sounds less like the culmination of years of careful refinement than a hurried effort from a band capable of far more. The Strokes’s musicianship remains as assured as ever, but the songs on Reality Awaits rarely cohere into anything greater than the sum of their individual parts.
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