The Strokes play The O2 arena on Tuesday 6 and Wednesday 7 October 2026 on the Reality Awaits tour, with Fat White Family and Alex Cameron in support.
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, and released Is This It in 2001. 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. The band has never entirely escaped it either.
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, which is part of why the early records were received as privileged and part of why nobody now cares. They spent most of the 2010s apart on other projects.
Reality Awaits is the seventh, released on 26 June 2026, recorded in Costa Rica with Rick Rubin and led by “Going Shopping”. They bring it to The O2 arena on Tuesday 6 and Wednesday 7 October 2026, with Fat White Family and Alex Cameron opening — a bill that says something about which end of the influence they still recognise.