A quarter-century after Is This It reset New York guitar rock, The Strokes bring Reality Awaits, their seventh album, to The O2 arena this October.
The Strokes bring Reality Awaits, their seventh album, to The O2 arena on Tuesday 6 and Wednesday 7 October 2026, a quarter-century after Is This It reset what a New York guitar band could sound like.
The Strokes came out of New York at the end of the 1990s, with Julian Casablancas singing, Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. on guitars, Nikolai Fraiture on bass and Fabrizio Moretti on drums. Their 2001 debut EP, The Modern Age, sparked a bidding war among labels before RCA signed them, and Is This It followed that summer. Lean hooks, laconic vocals, deliberately thin production: it landed hardest in Britain, where it was received as the antidote to everything that had gone before it, and the wave of bands that followed spent a decade trying to sound like it.
They have made six albums since and taken their time over all of them. The New Abnormal, in 2020, was the first in seven years and won the Grammy for best rock album. Four of the five met at school in Manhattan and the fifth at a boarding school in Switzerland.
Reality Awaits, the seventh album, came out on 26 June 2026, recorded in Costa Rica with Rick Rubin and led by Going Shopping. Fat White Family and Alex Cameron open, a bill that reads like a band choosing its own influences.