The Strokes Tour 2026

Inside The Strokes

The Strokes are the New York City five-piece who, over more than a quarter-century with the same five-man lineup intact, became the band that effectively rebooted guitar music for the 21st century. Julian Casablancas, Nick Valensi, Albert Hammond Jr., Nikolai Fraiture, and Fabrizio Moretti met as Manhattan and Upper East Side prep-school kids in the mid-1990s, started writing songs together in 1998, and released the three-track EP The Modern Age in early 2001 — a record so immediately, undeniably good that it set off one of the most ferocious major-label bidding wars of the era and effectively closed the door on the late-1990s post-grunge mainstream within weeks of its UK release. Is This It followed in July 2001 in Australia and the UK and in October 2001 in the United States, and the album has since been canonised at the top of nearly every serious 21st-century album list — Rolling Stone, NME, Pitchfork, Time, The Guardian — for the same reason it landed so hard at the time: eleven songs of taut, downtown, cold-bloodedly-arranged garage rock that sounded like the Velvet Underground, Television, the Cars, and Blondie had been compressed into a single 36-minute statement and dropped on a music industry that had spent five years selling rap-rock. Room on Fire (2003), First Impressions of Earth (2006), Angles (2011), Comedown Machine (2013), and the Rick Rubin-produced The New Abnormal (2020) followed across two decades, and The New Abnormal won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Album at the 63rd Grammys in 2021 — the band's first Grammy and a critical re-coronation that landed the Strokes back at the centre of the indie-rock conversation they had effectively launched. Live, the band have settled into a calendar of selective festival headline slots, multi-night residencies in their hometown of New York, and occasional touring runs in Latin America, Europe, the UK, and Asia — never the relentless arena treadmill of some of their peers, but a touring identity built on scarcity, on the catalogue, and on the kind of crowd response only a band whose debut record genuinely changed the trajectory of guitar music can pull. The Strokes arrive in your city not as a nostalgia act trading on Is This It, but as a working band still adding to a catalogue that already includes some of the most important rock songs of the century.

About The Strokes

The Strokes formed in New York City in 1998 when Julian Casablancas (vocals), Nick Valensi (guitar), and Fabrizio Moretti (drums) — three friends from the Dwight School in Manhattan — began writing songs together, recruited bassist Nikolai Fraiture from Lycée Français de New York where Casablancas had also briefly attended, and rounded out the five-piece lineup with rhythm guitarist Albert Hammond Jr., the son of singer-songwriter Albert Hammond Sr., whom Casablancas had met at Le Rosey boarding school in Switzerland years earlier. The five-piece played the Lower East Side and East Village circuit — Mercury Lounge, Arlene's Grocery, the Bowery Ballroom, Don Hill's, Luna Lounge — for roughly two years, sharpened the live show into the lean, suit-and-Converse, Marshall-stacks aesthetic that would define a decade of indie rock, and self-released the three-track The Modern Age EP through Rough Trade in the UK in January 2001. The bidding war that followed was historic: more than 20 labels in the running, the band ultimately signing with RCA in the US and Rough Trade in the UK, and the resulting debut album Is This It released in Australia and the UK in July 2001 and in the US in October 2001 with a revised cover and a substituted track (New York City Cops swapped out post-9/11 in the US edition). Is This It hit number two in the UK, certified platinum in multiple territories, and has since been ranked as the greatest album of the 2000s by Rolling Stone, NME, and Pitchfork among others — a record whose influence on the Killers, Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Libertines, Bloc Party, the Kooks, and effectively every guitar band of the next decade is impossible to overstate. Room on Fire (October 2003) doubled down on the formula with 12:51, Reptilia, and Under Control. First Impressions of Earth (January 2006) was the band's most ambitious record — 14 tracks, longer arrangements, the singles Juicebox, Heart in a Cage, and You Only Live Once — but also began the long internal stretch that saw the members pursue solo work: Casablancas with Phrazes for the Young (2009) and the Voidz, Hammond Jr. with multiple solo records starting with Yours to Keep (2006), Valensi with CRX, Moretti with Little Joy. Angles (March 2011) reunited the five-piece after a five-year hiatus and produced Under Cover of Darkness and Taken for a Fool. Comedown Machine (March 2013) closed the band's RCA contract. After a seven-year studio gap and a series of EPs and festival appearances, the Rick Rubin-produced The New Abnormal arrived in April 2020 with At the Door, Bad Decisions, The Adults Are Talking, and Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus — and won the Grammy for Best Rock Album in March 2021, the band's first Grammy in five nominations across a 20-year career. Across the run the Strokes have released six studio albums on RCA and Cult Records, sold an estimated 14 million records worldwide, kept the original five-man lineup intact across every record and tour, and watched their debut record become a permanent fixture at the top of every 21st-century best-of list it appears on.

The Strokes — live in 2026 and the touring identity

The Strokes do not tour like a typical rock band. Since The New Abnormal landed in 2020 the band have built their live calendar around three things: selective festival headline slots, multi-night residencies in their hometown of New York City, and short, dense touring runs in markets where the demand is strongest — Latin America (especially Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo), the UK and Ireland, mainland Europe (Spain, France, Germany), and occasional Asian dates in Japan and South Korea. The band have headlined Primavera Sound in Barcelona, All Points East in London, Lollapalooza in Chicago, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, Corona Capital in Mexico City, the Governors Ball in New York, Rock Werchter in Belgium, and Bilbao BBK Live among others on recent calendars. Any 2026 routing should be read against that pattern — the Strokes have not announced and historically do not run a global arena tour of the sort their peer-tier bands schedule, and any current-year framing in this article is hedged for that reason. The live set itself runs roughly 90 to 100 minutes across 18 to 22 songs and leans heavily on the Is This It catalogue (Last Nite, Hard to Explain, The Modern Age, Someday, New York City Cops in non-US territories, Take It or Leave It) while folding in Room on Fire highlights (Reptilia, 12:51, Under Control), First Impressions of Earth singles (You Only Live Once, Juicebox), Angles tracks (Under Cover of Darkness, Taken for a Fool), and the modern New Abnormal canon (The Adults Are Talking, Bad Decisions, At the Door, Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus). Casablancas's between-song banter is famously oblique — long pauses, off-microphone asides to the band, the occasional mid-set monologue — and the show is built on the band's playing rather than on production: lights, the suits, the Marshall stacks, no choreography, no video pyrotechnics. Doors typically open 90 minutes to two hours before showtime depending on venue and whether the bill is a Strokes headline or a festival closing slot.

The Strokes tickets

The Strokes tickets are sold through Ticketmaster, AXS, DICE, See Tickets, and regional primary partners depending on the territory, with the band typically routing through the venue's standard ticketing platform rather than running their own primary platform. Pricing on Strokes headline shows in arenas and large outdoor venues runs widely depending on market: upper-tier or pavilion seats from the equivalent of $50–$90 USD on the cheap end, mid-bowl and general admission floor from $90–$170, premium reserved and pit standing from $180–$300, and a limited VIP package allocation — typically pre-show lounge access, early entry, and merchandise bundles — at $350 and up. Festival headline appearances are sold as part of the overall festival ticket and not separately as Strokes-only tickets. Verified Fan registration has been used on selected US on-sales to filter out resale brokers and bots, particularly for the band's New York hometown dates. Secondary market reality for in-demand cities — New York, Los Angeles, London, Mexico City, Buenos Aires — is that face-value tickets to a Strokes headline show do not last long on general on-sale, and the cleanest verified resale routes are Ticketmaster Verified Resale, AXS Official Resale, DICE waiting list, and Twickets in the UK, all of which cap resale at face value plus fees in most jurisdictions. Avoid generic search-ad ticket sites and any seller asking for payment outside an escrowed marketplace; the Strokes catalogue makes the band a high-fraud target on secondary markets that do not require buyer protection.

The Strokes setlist — what they play

A typical Strokes headline set in the modern era runs 18 to 22 songs across roughly 90 to 100 minutes and is structured to land the Is This It catalogue near the front and back of the show with the deeper cuts and the New Abnormal material clustered through the middle. Recent setlists have opened on The Adults Are Talking or Bad Decisions from The New Abnormal, dropped into Hard to Explain or The Modern Age inside the first three songs, and built the early run with Reptilia, Someday, Juicebox, and 12:51 in rotation. The middle of the show varies night to night and is where the band rotate deep cuts — Under Control, Heart in a Cage, You Only Live Once, Automatic Stop, Soma, Trying Your Luck, Razorblade, Vision of Division, Threat of Joy, Why Are Sundays So Depressing — alongside New Abnormal album tracks Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus, At the Door, and Eternal Summer. The closing run almost always lands on Last Nite as a singalong centrepiece, often paired with Take It or Leave It as the night's blowoff, and in non-US territories the band frequently close on New York City Cops (the track was substituted out of the US edition of Is This It post-9/11 and remains a setlist signal that the band are playing the international version of the catalogue). Encore breaks are short and informal; the band have at times skipped the encore entirely and run straight through. Setlist.fm is the most reliable real-time source for confirming exactly what your specific date is playing — the Strokes are one of the more variable major rock acts on the road from night to night within a single tour leg.

Tour cities