The Strokes share slow-burning new single ‘Falling Out Of Love’ ahead of ‘Reality Awaits’

The Strokes have pushed another piece of Reality Awaits into view, releasing the slow-burning, tender new single ‘Falling Out Of Love’ as the album’s rollout gathers pace.

The New York band began teasing fresh music earlier this year, telling fans they would “be in touch” about a new release before eventually confirming the album title. Last month, they set a June 26 release date for the record, the follow-up to 2020’s The New Abnormal, and paired the announcement with the slick lead single ‘Going Shopping’. The new track lands as a contrasting second glimpse: softer, more intimate, and less interested in the clipped swagger that often defines their bigger moments.

On Wednesday May 13, Julian Casablancas and the group unveiled ‘Falling Out Of Love’, a song that leans into heartbreak and the uneasy comfort of solitude. The arrangement is stripped back, built around gentle, swirling guitar lines and Casablancas’ vocal, which spends much of the track run through a vocoder. The effect recalls the band’s 2013 Daft Punk collaboration ‘Instant Crush’, and later material such as 2020’s ‘At the Door’.

“Took you out to my hometown/ Where I learned to be alone/ Riding up the mountainside/ Where all the world’s here,” Casablancas sings, before the chorus settles into something both bruised and oddly buoyant. “Hiding out for a while/ Falling out of love for the first time/ Some things are flawed by design/ But I’m fine for the first time,” he sings. “Dancing in acid rain alone with you/ But I don’t wanna do it anymore/ I guess I’ll sing alone.”

It is the fourth track on the nine-song Reality Awaits tracklist, an album recorded in Costa Rica with producer Rick Rubin before being finished across several international locations. That detail has already become part of the record’s mythology, though the songs themselves are doing the real work here: less mythic than the circumstances, more exact about the band’s current mood.

When ‘Going Shopping’ arrived last month, NME gave it three stars, calling it a song that “doesn’t feel bold” but “does avoid playing anything safe.” The review also noted that “You couldn’t definitively place its sound on any of The Strokes’ previous six albums, but the lack of spirit and tenacity – save for a guitar solo at the end – is noticeable.” It ended with Casablancas’ line “If you’re better than me you don’t have to judge me”, before adding that “perhaps even he would admit that The Strokes are better than this.”

The band’s return has already moved beyond studio teasers. Since that single came out, The Strokes have played Coachella 2026, where they called out the CIA and the United States government, and they are now lined up for more festival dates at Bonnaroo, Summer Sonic and beyond. They have also announced a major tour across the UK, North America, Europe and Japan. It will be their first full run of headline dates in the UK and Ireland in more than 20 years, with a stop scheduled at London’s O2. Support comes from Thundercat, Cage the Elephant, Hamilton Leithauser, Fat White Family, Alex Cameron and ÖLÜM, and tickets are available here.

The new music also arrives after Casablancas said in 2024 that he was “stepping away” from the band to focus on The Voidz, though he added that “it’s a very cool day job that I’m honoured to have, so I don’t feel negatively about it”. That balancing act has become familiar around The Strokes in recent years: the band remains central, but never uncomplicatedly so.

Rubin previously told The Joe Rogan Experience in 2022 that the group recorded the new material “on the top of a mountain” and “didn’t want to leave” because they were having “the best experience”. Hammond Jr. later echoed that account, calling it “one of his favourite recording experiences”. “I don’t think if I told you what it looked like and what it was, you’d fully understand the ‘magical-ness’ of where we were and how it was to record like that,” he said, before adding that the band still has unfinished business. “I really think what excites me about wanting to play music and continue doing it is, I don’t think we’ve written our best songs yet. I really feel that in my gut.”