The Strokes Tap Richard Prince for ‘Reality Awaits’ Cover, Drawing Parallels Between Art and Precision

The Strokes have revealed the cover for their next album, Reality Awaits, selecting a work by American artist Richard Prince. The choice is less decoration than editorial statement, aligning the band’s tightly regimented songwriting with Prince’s approach to image-making.

Prince became known for appropriating pre-existing photographs—most famously in his Untitled (cowboy) series, where he rephotographed Marlboro ads, cropping out the cigarettes to leave only the mythic silhouette against orange dunes and blue sky. The result was simultaneously a critique of manufactured American identity and a stark, glossy object. He didn’t manipulate the darkroom process; he simply isolated what was already there, forcing the viewer to sit with the raw element.

The Strokes have long operated under a similar logic. Their sound is rarely about technical flash. Instead, they reduce rock to its essential components—tight rhythms, precise guitar lines, deliberate restraint—and then repeat them until the structure becomes something else entirely. Albums like Is This It and Room on Fire felt like a distillation of New York cool, almost architectural in their economy. Even when the band stumbled on First Impressions of Earth, it wasn’t from lack of skill but from overreaching that same minimalist framework. Later records, especially Angles, found the group splitting songwriting duties, each member recontextualizing the Strokes’ core language in separate rooms—an act of cropping and reframing not unlike Prince’s method of turning a billboard into a statement.

Using Prince’s work for Reality Awaits makes that parallel explicit. No details about the album’s sound have been released, but the visual announcement already frames the record as another exercise in focus: get the image right, crop out the noise, and let what remains speak for itself.