Mac DeMarco On the New Strokes Album? Fans Have a Theory
“Going Shopping” arrived on April 7th on cassette, literally on cassette, mailed to one hundred selected fans. It’s the lead single from Reality Awaits, the seventh Strokes album, produced by Rick Rubin and due June 26, 2026. Six years after The New Abnormal. The most anticipated return in independent rock this decade.
And yet, the first thing fans said upon hearing it wasn’t “welcome back.” It was: “this sounds like The Voidz.”
The guitars on “Going Shopping” are clean but slightly muted, less sharp than the band’s early work, more in line with the polished textures of The New Abnormal. The autotune on Julian’s vocals sparked immediate debate, but what slipped under the radar was something else: that specific guitar sound, relaxed, almost distracted, that several fans began associating not with Albert Hammond Jr. or Nick Valensi, but with someone from outside the band.
The name that came up: Mac DeMarco.
It’s not a baseless theory. Mac already produced music for The Voidz, “The Eternal Tao”, recorded over a weekend at his Silver Lake home alongside Kirin J Callinan. The Voidz bassist described the experience: “Mac has really dialed his rig and his signal chain is incredibly tasteful. It was interesting to hear ourselves in a foreign sonic atmosphere.”
The friendship between Mac and Julian is long and documented. At Shaky Knees Festival, Julian said Mac’s name from the stage in front of the entire audience, making everyone believe he had played guitar with The Strokes that night. Mac hadn’t played a note, but said it was “such a funny thing to have on your track record.” The kind of relationship that generates shared jokes in public doesn’t get built in a day.
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Mac DeMarco is from Edmonton, Alberta. For over a decade he’s been the central figure of exported Canadian indie. That his sound appears, or seems to appear, on The Strokes’ return is not a minor detail for those of us following the scene from up here.
The only credits published so far point to Rick Rubin as producer. The full album drops June 26th, and with it, perhaps, the answer.
The question stays open until then.
Do you also hear Mac in “Going Shopping” or is it just fans hearing things?
