Under the Unisphere, the Strokes Come Home to Queens
A rainy, political, all-day homecoming at Flushing Meadows with Beach House, TV on the Radio and Fcukers on the bill
The rain came right after TV on the Radio walked off. It was Friday evening in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, the grass already chewed up by a long afternoon, and for a few minutes the whole field wondered whether the night was about to go the way of so many outdoor shows this fall. Then it stopped. A wet fog settled over the lawn, the light went out of the sky, and Beach House began to play.
That was the turn of a long day the Strokes built for themselves. The band has spent 2026 crossing the festival circuit, from Coachella and Bonnaroo to Outside Lands and Just Like Heaven, and when it finally booked a New York date in June, it chose the Queens park that hosts Governors Ball and stacked the bill like a small festival of its own. Beach House, TV on the Radio and the New York dance duo Fcukers all played before the headliners. Rolling Stone put the crowd at roughly 40,000.
It was also the last North American stop of the tour behind Reality Awaits, the band's seventh album, which came out on July 24. London is next, with two nights at the O2 starting Tuesday.
A Day in Four Moods
The afternoon belonged to Fcukers, the Ninja Tune duo whose sleazy, Y2K-tinted house music played to a field that was still filling up. In its recap, Consequence noted that the duo had played the same park at Governors Ball earlier this year and marveled at how much volume singer Shanny Wise pulls out of such light, breathy melodies.
TV on the Radio followed, a Brooklyn band playing its first show of the year. The group opened with "Young Liars" and reached its peak with "Repetition" and "Wolf Like Me," a song that, according to Consequence, saw a big jump in streams after it turned up in this summer's Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Singer Tunde Adebimpe sounded as big as the field.
Then the weather. The city has had a hard few weeks with outdoor music. Storms last weekend took down the CBGB Festival under the K Bridge and other events with it, so the sudden downpour carried some real dread. It cleared before Beach House started, and the Baltimore band used the gloom well. "PPP" and "Superstar" drifted out over the damp crowd, and the set landed as the quiet high point of the day for at least one critic on the lawn.
For a few minutes the whole field wondered whether the night was about to go the way of so many outdoor shows this fall.
Politics Before the Encore
The Strokes have never kept their politics off the stage, and Friday made that plain from early in the day. At 3:30 in the afternoon, Julian Casablancas moderated a live panel for his series S.O.S. Earth Is a Mess on a side stage at the concert site, with the political strategist Maya Rupert, the labor organizer Chris Smalls and the comedian Lee Camp. Village Works, the East Village bookstore, sold books Casablancas picked by hand, alongside titles by the panelists.
The bigger surprise came just before the headliners. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez walked out to introduce the band, and then she brought out Senator Bernie Sanders. The Strokes played a run of rallies for Sanders during his 2020 presidential campaign, and the two speakers leaned on that history and on the coming election.
"The greatest city in the world is now welcoming the greatest rock band of our generation." Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Sanders opened with a joke about singing a few songs himself, then thanked the band for its stands on economic justice and health care and told the crowd to vote in November. When Casablancas took the stage, he teased drummer Fabrizio Moretti for "making out with Bernie Sanders," and the band went straight into "Lonely in the Future," one of the new songs.
The Hometown Set
According to Consequence, the band played five songs from Reality Awaits and paired them with the early material that made its name. "Going to Babble On" was the new one that hit hardest, and "Heart in a Cage" tore through the field. Nick Valensi, who stepped away from the band's touring lineup earlier this year, did not reappear for the hometown date. The biggest shock was an omission. There was no "Last Nite."
Getting in was not cheap. A few days before the show, the New York Post found general admission passes on resale for around $270 with fees, with VIP access starting at about $476. For that, fans got four bands that sound almost nothing alike, a rainstorm, a senator and a band that still plays like it has something to prove in its own city.
The Strokes came out of downtown Manhattan at the turn of the century and spent the next 25 years as the shorthand for a certain kind of New York night. Friday they played under the open sky in Queens, on the old World's Fair grounds, and the songs still sounded like the ride home.
