Here’s a sentence no old-head Strokes fan wants to hear: to understand Reality Awaits, the stalwart NYC group’s seventh album and first in six years, you first have to understand the Voidz. Julian Casablancas’s other band has been taking up more and more of his time in recent years, much to the chagrin of fans who may have dipped into the group’s painfully, awkwardly proggy 2014 debut Tyranny and decided to just let the old legend have his fun (away from their own speakers, of course). Anyone who decided to listen further will have found that the Voidz have turned into a great, crowd-pleasing, safely experimental zone for Casablancas to pull out some of the most energised, goofy work of his career. If you’re thinking I come to this guy for cool, not goof, I don’t know what to tell you: this is a man who spends interviews discussing his theories about ancient Sumerian culture.

The artwork for Reality Awaits by the Stokes. Photograph: Richard Prince

The 2018 Voidz record Virtue is a high point of Casablancas’s entire catalogue: a gentle stylistic mixed bag that covers winsome pop-rock, yacht rock, bedroom pop and much more. That album seemed to clear the decks for the Strokes’ last record, 2020’s The New Abnormal, on which they sounded the most like their 2001 selves since Is This It. That album is now the definitive Strokes album for gen Z – go to any Strokes show and watch the younger contingent light up during The Adults Are Talking – but it didn’t presage a long-term back-to-basics route for Casablancas and co. On Reality Awaits, by sheer force of will, he fuses the crackpot strangeness and, ahem, fondness for AutoTune of the Voidz with the Strokes’ minimalism and pop melodicism.

It’s this combination that gets you some of Casablancas’s funniest, most interesting performances in years: warbling unintelligibly about John Legend and Josh Groban; borderline screaming the phrase “and in a hundred thousand years from now!” in order to fit it neatly to an old-timey Strokes melody; singing sweetly about “starting again” on Going to Babble On, one of the most winsome, heartfelt Strokes songs since their debut. It’s worth emphasising, once again, that Casablancas is no longer the louche chronicler of downtown cool that he once was. But he’s still a totally compelling frontman and, even with a tighter-than-ever rhythm section, the hot-burning core of this band.

If Casablancas sometimes sounded like he was going through the motions on The New Abnormal, Reality Awaits retrofits the madcap experimentalist side of the Voidz to cleaner, more tuneful production; the result is playful and frequently joyful. Going Shopping rides a simple, insistent yacht rock groove that allows Nick Valensi to noodle with increasing intensity as Casablancas sings about being a “seven-foot zombie”, while the dubby The Fruits of Conquest revives the sinister 80s sleaze of 2011’s Angles with a little more conviction.

Inevitably, Reality Awaits suffers from the same sense of clumsiness that’s touched most recent Casablancas projects. Here, it arrives in the form of Tyrants of the Mellow Moon, the album’s formless, ambling closer. Unlike the rest of the record, which is content to gambol in pop structure, Tyrants feels unwieldy and leaden, threatening to drag down what is otherwise one of the band’s most nimble outings in years. Here, Casablancas’s AutoTuned warblings feel oppositional to the band’s moody soundscape; it feels like the first time, amazingly, on the whole record that his Voidziness is threatening to eclipse his Strokesiness. But that the two sides can align so thoroughly, and so pleasurably, is itself a victory – for years, it’s felt like the Strokes have been his cash-grab project. Now, it feels like there’s a whole lot more road left for the group to explore.