The concert began with a roar of guitars and the deafening clamor of the Barcelona audience. On the stage of the Palau Sant Jordi, Julian Casablancas intoned Tyrants of the mellow moon with an excess of autotune. He came out dressed in a black trench coat and sunglasses that he did not take off during the whole concert. At the beginning, more shy: hanging from the microphone and swaying from one foot to the other, turning his back to check the setlist. But, little by little, something started heating up. The audience, who were already shouting everything from the start, erupted with Reptilia. It was after the third track that the singer spoke for the first time: “It smells like Spain. Oops, no, like Catalonia,” he said.
The Strokes were returning to Barcelona for the first time since their concert at Primavera Sound in 2022. This year, the band returns without guitarist and co-founder Nick Valensi, replaced by Steve Schiltz, and with an album that has divided the audience. The repertoire, however, managed to strike a balance between nostalgia and novelty. In addition to touches from every era, the bulk of the songs played were from Reality awaits (2026), the album that gives the tour its name and from Is this it (2001), the iconic debut album. Among the crowd, however, there was a timelessness that is hard to explain: the blue lights of mobile phones were minimal, and if there were hands raised, it was not to record, but to mark the rhythm and reach towards the singer. With Heart in a cage a small mosh pit formed, which multiplied and repeated later with every hit. There were people perched on shoulders, friends hugging after a song, their song, and, little by little, small lighter flames began to be seen on the dance floor. Towards the end of the concert, tobacco smoke reached the stands.
At the Palau Sant Jordi it was hard to determine what kind of audience had come to see the Strokes. There were teenagers accompanied by their parents, parents accompanied by teenagers, millennials with as many gray hairs as tattoos, some from the old school and many young people who felt the band was as much theirs as anyone else’s. The album The new abnormal (2020) became a viral hit among Generation Z, and when at the concert Julian Casablancas announced “with the adults”, repeating a fan’s shout, the audience erupted: The adults are talking played and they sang the verse and the chorus with him. Perhaps the most surprising thing was how the newest repertoire was treated with the same reverence as the classics.
Perhaps Reality awaits has been a murkier record, both in imagery and sonority, and some sectors of the critics have considered that the autotune and Casablancas’ ironic lyrics place too much distance between the group and the listener. The album speaks of disorientation in the face of an absurd world, of political and media manipulation, technology, consumerism. Casablancas plays with the character, but in live performances it is clear that between the falsetto, the howls, and the jokes to annoy the fans, there is a sincerity—perhaps involuntary—that connects very well with the here and now. It is precisely this that has made the band never sound like a tribute to The Strokes.
As the concert progressed, Casablancas became more inclined to comment on things between songs, playing with his bandmates and the audience, albeit in a rather limited way. Where he truly expanded was in the music: he improvised lyrics and melodies over the riffs of the guitars and drums, in a kind of musical incontinence. In the end, it seemed that neither the audience nor the band wanted to leave, and The Strokes ended up playing three encores. First, a false ending with the hit Last night, where Casablancas left the stage theatrically shrugging his shoulders. Then Ode to the mets and Selfless. Finally, the musicians threw their drumsticks and guitar picks into the crowd, and the singer thanked the technical crew and his bandmates, before leaving while shouting “my name is Julian”.
Outside the venue, after the concert, a crowd of people was walking down the MNAC stairs discussing the milestone. When on one of the landings they encountered a street musician who was taking the opportunity to play Last night on the sax, the crowd joined in to chant the melody like a group of football fans returning home after having won.
