For a band with a reputation for occasionally treating festival sets like an obligation, the Strokes looked unusually engaged at Outside Lands.
It helped that they had something new to play and that midway through the set on Saturday, Aug. 8, one of the biggest pop stars in the world was waiting in the wings.
Charli xcx made a surprise return to the Lands End stage less than 24 hours after headlining it herself, joining the New York band for “Take It or Leave It” and creating the weekend’s biggest cross-generational crossover moment.
Just hours earlier, she had been about 4 miles away at the Amoeba Music on Haight Street for an in-store fan Q&A.
The Strokes perform live with Charli xcx at Lands End stage on the second day of Outside Lands in San Francisco, Saturday, August 8, 2026. (Manuel Orbegozo/For the S.F. Chronicle)
Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas introduced her with the loose, self-deprecating humor that has long made his stage banter either charming or maddening, depending on the night.
Both acts released new albums July 24: Charli’s “Music, Fashion, Film” and the Strokes’ “Reality Awaits,” the band’s first album since 2020.
Casablancas turned that coincidence into a joke about their respective commercial fortunes.
“You’re the Queen of album sales,” he told Charli.
Then he turned to the crowd.
“She won – won by a lot,” Casablancas said. “She’s a giant pop star in our defense.”
The Strokes perform live at Lands End stage on the second day of Outside Lands in San Francisco, Saturday, August 8, 2026. (Manuel Orbegozo/For the S.F. Chronicle)
The moment worked because it didn’t feel engineered into some grand festival spectacle. Charli simply appeared, traded vocals with Casablancas on one of the Strokes’ oldest and most combustible songs, then disappeared again.
For a few minutes, two very different versions of New York cool – one rooted in the early-2000s garage-rock revival, the other in hyperpop and post-“Brat” reinvention – occupied the same stage.
The Strokes opened with “Ize of the World” before snapping into “Hard to Explain,” one of the songs that made “Is This It” feel so startling when it arrived 25 years ago.
From there, the set moved freely across the band’s catalog, pairing newer material such as “Going Shopping” and “Dine N’Dash” with songs that have long since become festival shorthand, such as “Someday,” “Juicebox,” “Last Nite,” “Reptilia” and “The Adults Are Talking.”
The Strokes have always worked best when they sound slightly under-rehearsed without actually being sloppy, with guitars locking together with almost mechanical precision while Casablancas gives the impression he might wander off mid-song.
The Strokes’s singer Julian Casablancas performs live at Lands End stage on the second day of Outside Lands in San Francisco, Saturday, August 8, 2026. (Manuel Orbegozo/For the S.F. Chronicle)
Recent tour reviews suggested the band is playing with more focus than during some of its more uneven festival appearances in recent years. That was the case here, too. The songs had bite, especially the older ones, without turning into museum pieces.
“Take It or Leave It” remains particularly well suited to a giant field because it does not need much embellishment. It is blunt, fast and built around a lean guitar line.
The same was true of “Reptilia,” whose clipped riff cut through the Polo Field with little need for nostalgia to do the work.
Casablancas, meanwhile, remained Casablancas.
“How are you San Franpsychos doing tonight?!” he screamed at the crowd, who reciprocated with a wave of cheers. “It’s good to be back in the dive bar capital of the world.”
His between-song chatter wandered, doubled back and occasionally seemed designed primarily to amuse himself. But it also kept the show from becoming the kind of pristine legacy-rock exercise the Strokes have always seemed temperamentally incapable of delivering.
The Strokes’s guitarist Albert Hammond Jr. performs live at Lands End stage on the second day of Outside Lands in San Francisco, Saturday, August 8, 2026. (Manuel Orbegozo/For the S.F. Chronicle)
The band is now old enough to inspire nostalgia among fans who discovered “Is This It” when they were teenagers and reverence from younger listeners who encountered the Strokes as a foundational act.
“The Adults Are Talking,” released in 2020, received a reaction nearly as strong as some of the band’s earliest hits. “Someday” still sounded effortless. “Last Nite” remained instantly recognizable.
And then there was Charli xcx, effectively dropping into the middle of the Strokes’ history to remind everyone that the band’s influence has long since escaped the confines of indie rock.
Twenty-five years after “Is This It,” they can headline one of San Francisco’s biggest festivals, play alongside artists who grew up in the world they helped create and invite the previous night’s headliner out for a song without making the moment feel like a desperate grab for relevance.
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This article originally published at Charli xcx joins the Strokes for surprise Outside Lands duet: ‘You’re the Queen’.