The Strokes

Dwight School, then Rough Trade

The Strokes came together in New York City in 1998 from two separate circles of schoolfriends. Julian Casablancas, Nick Valensi and Fabrizio Moretti met at the Dwight School in Manhattan. Nikolai Fraiture had known Casablancas since childhood. Albert Hammond Jr joined late in 1998, having crossed paths with Casablancas years earlier at the Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland.

The Modern Age EP, released on Rough Trade in 2001, did the work a demo is supposed to do and then some: it set off a label scramble that ended with a signature to RCA. Is This It followed the same year, arriving first in Australia, Japan and the UK over the summer and then in North America that October. Eleven songs, no fat, two guitars locked into interlocking lines rather than stacked for volume — the record reorganised what a guitar band was expected to sound like for most of the decade that followed, and a good deal of the touring economy of the 2020s still runs on bands who heard it at the right age.

The catalogue the live show actually leans on

Room on Fire arrived in 2003 and refined rather than rebuilt. First Impressions of Earth, in 2006, went longer, denser and more fraught, and is the album the band have been mining hardest on this tour — the Red Rocks set in July 2026 drew five songs from it against four from Is This It.

Then the gaps opened up. Angles came in 2011 after a five-year silence filled with solo records and side projects, and Comedown Machine followed in 2013 to a conspicuous absence of promotion. Seven years passed before The New Abnormal in 2020, the first album made with Rick Rubin, and the one that finally converted critical goodwill into a trophy: Best Rock Album at the 63rd Grammy Awards. It also supplied Ode to the Mets and The Adults Are Talking, both of which now sit in the set as reliably as Reptilia.

Reality Awaits

The seventh album was announced in April 2026 alongside the tour. Going Shopping landed as the first single on 7 April, Falling Out of Love on 13 May. The release itself slipped by a month, from late June to 24 July, and came out on Cult Records through RCA: nine tracks, forty-two minutes, Rubin producing again across sessions at Villa Nimbú in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, Shangri-La in Malibu and The Mansion in Los Angeles. Hammond Jr has described the Costa Rica stretch as magical and the results as looser than the band's recent work.

Reviews were warm without being unanimous — a Metacritic average of 70 from seventeen critics. The Guardian gave it four stars, Shaad D'Souza calling it a far weirder and more challenging listen than The New Abnormal and a bold statement from a band too often written off as a nostalgia act, while conceding that some songs sound tired where they should bite. Jon Dolan in Rolling Stone summed it up as an at times thrilling, often inscrutable, sometimes straight-up bizarre addition to their story.

Commercially it did what late-career guitar records do now: number 13 on the Billboard 200 off 29,991 album-equivalent units in its first week, number 8 in the UK, number 10 in Australia, and number one on Japan's rock albums chart.

A missing guitarist

The largest unresolved thing about this tour is who is standing stage right. In mid-May 2026 the band said on Instagram Stories that Valensi would take a temporary break from the scheduled dates, with no reason and no timeline attached, and that holding down the guitar in the meantime would be Steve Schiltz — the Longwave frontman, and an old friend from the band's early New York years.

It was not a cold start. Schiltz had already covered for Valensi at warm-up shows in San Francisco earlier in the spring, before Valensi returned for the band's Coachella sets in April. He has been in the line-up for the whole of the run since, including the Bonnaroo headline set that opened the tour in mid-June, where Valensi was absent as announced. Reviewers have not treated the substitution as a handicap; the interlocking two-guitar arrangements have survived intact, which says something about how specifically those parts are written.

The route, and what is already booked

The first North American leg ran from Bonnaroo through to two nights at Red Rocks on 22 and 23 July, Thundercat and Hamilton Leithauser opening most dates and Cage the Elephant appearing on others. A second American run closed in September with arena shows in Tampa on the 12th and Hollywood, Florida on the 13th, Charlotte on the 17th, Shaky Knees in Atlanta on the 18th and Sea.Hear.Now in Asbury Park on the 20th.

A hometown show at Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Queens on 2 October — their first New York concert since 2023, with Beach House, TV on the Radio and Fcukers — hands over to the European leg. That begins with two nights at The O2 in London on 6 and 7 October and continues through Amsterdam's Ziggo Dome on the 11th, the PSD Bank Dome in Düsseldorf on the 13th, Berlin's Uber Arena on the 15th, the Unipol Arena outside Bologna on the 17th, Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona on the 20th, the Accor Arena in Paris on the 22nd, Newcastle's Utilita Arena on the 25th, Co-op Live in Manchester on the 26th and the 3Arena in Dublin on the 28th. Fat White Family and Alex Cameron open the European shows. The British dates amount to the band's first full UK tour in twenty years.

South American dates follow in November, taking in Lima, Mexico City, Quito, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Bogotá and São Paulo. On 24 September the band added four Australian shows for February 2027 — Brisbane Entertainment Centre on the 13th, two nights at Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne on the 16th and 17th, and the inaugural Sydney Summertime event at Centennial Park on the 20th — with Courtney Barnett and Promiseland across the run and Beck joining in Sydney. Tickets went on sale on 29 September. It is their first Australian headline tour since 2022.