There’s a version of this story that writes itself easily. The Strokes, six years gone, recorded on a Costa Rican mountaintop with Rick Rubin, playing open air to the ocean every day, come back with something that reminds you why they mattered. That story is not available here.
“Going Shopping,” the lead single from their seventh album Reality Awaits, is a song about consumer culture and political numbness, Julian Casablancas watching the slow seduction of comfort over solidarity, the mall as an exit from a reality that keeps getting harder to face. The lyrics push at something real: the idea that the worse things get, the less anyone wants to hear about it, that solidarity gets difficult when you’ve got cool stuff to lose. There are stockbrokers flying out of windows while the song keeps bumping. It’s a sharper lyrical premise than it first appears.
The music doesn’t get anywhere near that thought.
The opening doesn’t land. It arrives slightly sideways, and nothing underneath corrects it. The vocal comes in so processed the character is gone before you can register it. The autotune across “Going Shopping” isn’t a style move in any productive sense. It doesn’t add a layer of unreality that might connect to the lyrics’ themes of political puppetry and consumer fog. It sits on top of the vocal and drains it. You lose the phrasing. You lose the grain. You lose the thing that made a Julian Casablancas performance worth tracking in the first place. On The New Abnormal, his voice on “At the Door” bent the vocoder to something genuinely strange and affecting. Here the pitch correction just flattens everything out and leaves nothing behind.
The mix compounds this. Everything is dry, and not in the way a Strokes record is usually dry. This isn’t the stripped, pressurised production of Is This It, guitars and drums locked in a room together until something dangerous happens. It’s dry in a different way. Thin. The guitars, which should be carrying the momentum across four and a half minutes, sound rough without sounding aggressive. Not raw and intentional, just undercooked. The duelling interplay that gave “Reptilia” its propulsion and “Last Nite” its locked-in tension is absent. What remains bounces mildly and stays there.
Casablancas has quoted Miles Davis on the necessity of change. Rick Rubin, who produced First Impressions of Earth and is back in the room for Reality Awaits, described the Costa Rica sessions as one of the best recording experiences he’d ever had. Albert Hammond Jr. told the press he genuinely believed the band hadn’t written their best songs yet. All of that context lands strangely against what “Going Shopping” actually sounds like. It doesn’t sound like a band energised by altitude and possibility. It sounds like a song that never found itself.
The vocal doesn’t anchor anything. Casablancas drifts through the track without urgency, the phrasing never pushing against the groove or finding anything to push against. The lyrics clock their sharpest moment early: “The worse reality gets, the less you wanna hear about it / Solidarity can be difficult / When you got cool stuff to lose.” That’s genuinely clear-eyed, the mechanism of political apathy described with the precision Casablancas can still locate when he’s looking. But the delivery doesn’t find that precision. It coasts past it.
The structure doesn’t rescue anything. There’s no turn, no moment where the song shifts and the listening suddenly feels like it was going somewhere all along. It runs its four minutes, the groove bobbing, the autotune sitting on everything, and stops. Against The New Abnormal, the distance is obvious. That record had energy and movement. “The Adults Are Talking” coiled and released. “Bad Decisions” knew exactly what it was doing with its borrowed melody. “Going Shopping” doesn’t appear to know what it’s doing at any particular moment, and the length starts to drag not because the song is long but because nothing inside it changes.
The Reddit comparison to “One Way Trigger,” the Comedown Machine single that split listeners over Julian’s falsetto choices, is instructive. Both songs ask you to follow Casablancas somewhere unfamiliar and trust the ride. “One Way Trigger” had a kind of committed strangeness to it. This has the strangeness without the commitment.
The Strokes sent “Going Shopping” out on cassette first, let bootlegs spread, debuted it live in San Francisco before streaming. They are set to play Coachella this coming weekend, with a prime Saturday night slot on the main stage ahead of Justin Bieber’s headline set, before further appearances at Bonnaroo, Outside Lands and Japan’s Summer Sonic. Reality Awaits arrives June 26th via Cult Records/RCA.
Maybe the album knows something the single doesn’t. But right now, “Going Shopping” is a song about the pull of the mall that never manages to pull.
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