Arctic Monkeys have spent most of their career learning how to chill out.
After a rise as rapid as the tempos on their first two records, each album the Sheffield, UK, quartet have released since seems to slow the pace a few BPMs more than the previous one.
"That's something that's coming back to bite me 15 years later," says Alex Turner, the band's singer, guitarist and primary songwriter, of the physicality involved in playing the band's early hits today. "After our third album [2009's Humbug], everything starts to get a bit looser. We just haven't been writing the kind songs that require that kind of tempo."
The lunar expedition of 2018's Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino added exotica and jazzy pop orchestration, setting the stage for The Car, the band's earthbound seventh album. It completes the evolution of Arctic Monkeys — singer-guitarist Turner, guitarist Jamie Cook, bassist Nick O'Malley (who replaced Andy Nicholson in 2006) and drummer Matthew Helders — from naïve teenage rabble-rousers to wizened and occasionally cynical elder statesmen.
The Car began life as a photograph. Taken by Helders, it showed a single vehicle parked on an otherwise empty rooftop parking lot, shot from a long distance. "I've wanted to see that image on a record cover since before I'd written the record," says Turner, speaking with Exclaim! on the phone from London. A blown up version of the picture hung on his wall while writing what would become its soundtrack. But Turner seems to have not considered its influence on the album until now. "I think perhaps it was in the back of my mind more than I realized," he concedes. "There's definitely a few times where lyrics drift into a kind of surveillance place, and they share that feel with that picture."
The album luxuriates in itself: intentional and slow-moving. Turner's voice, which once rattled off bon mots in rapid-fire sing-speak, has evolved into a Bowie-esque croon, perfectly paired with the album's orchestral arrangements, especially on lead single "There'd Better Be a Mirrorball." Its pace makes big moments feel bigger, like the blasts of sound on "I Ain't Quite Where I Think I Am." Yet, similar to Pulp's dark masterpiece This Is Hardcore, there's a sinister edge that adds a dash of tension to even the album's most tender moments, as if Turner and his bandmates are knowingly staring down the last days of decadence even as they pour themselves another glass of champagne.
He calls the record's various musical elements "characters." "The band kind of play a few different roles, and so do the arrangements," he says. Mixing those characters, trying to figure out how much of each one was necessary for each song, proved to be a challenge. "We were way in the weeds, like probably deeper than on any of the other [records] that we've made," he admits. "Sculptures of Anything Goes," the most electronic track on the record, took a particularly circuitous route to its final form, one that wasn't far removed from where it started. "There are times when it feels like the rock band is sort of on one fader side, and it comes up briefly and then disappears again."
Turner speaks in short, clipped phrases. He is thoughtful, if non-committal; new thoughts often overtake old ones before the latter can be fully articulated. Asked if there's any intended meaning to the album's title, its title track, or the fact that cars are a recurring image in the album's lyrics, Turner offers: "It does crop up a few times in lyrics, to the point where I noticed. I don't know if I could live with myself if I missed the opportunity to call something The Car, and they told me upstairs they wanted something punchy this time after the last one. So I was kind of trying to kind of give them that."
Arctic Monkeys were huge before they'd put out their first album. One of the only bands to benefit from both the rapid rise of online fame via file-sharing and old-school media outlets' coverage of that rise, their debut, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, was the fastest-selling album in UK chart history. While they've enjoyed a solid following in North America since the beginning, the groovy thump of 2013's AM unexpectedly blew them up into an arena-sized attraction. Turner was then being referred to as the greatest songwriter and lyricist of his generation — all of which made Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, a series of vignettes set in and around a fictional lunar colony, so confounding to the band's newly expanded fanbase.
Still, every one of their records has debuted at No. 1 in the UK charts, a stunning feat for an independent band, especially one so willing to throw out what's worked in the past and chart their own sonic course. So it was a bit surprising when "505," a deep cut from the band's 2007 album Favourite Worst Nightmare, found a new audience on TikTok. The 15-year-old track, never a single, is now the band's third-most played song on Spotify behind a pair of AM songs, with over 830 million streams.
"You would be forgiven for thinking that any of the songs from any of the records could bubble up to the surface," Turner says. "But I don't think that is the case." He points out that the song has always been a live favourite, often closing their main set. "I don't think you get that thing that you just described happening if it's not already kind of got that status in live shows to start with."
Like any band with a long career, Arctic Monkeys have lost a lot of songs along the way, dropped from their set with the band having little intention of ever playing them again. "We've gone far enough down the road that I don't think anything's off-limits in the catalogue, if you'll excuse me calling it that," says Turner. Indeed, the shows leading up to The Car's release, the band's first in three years, have seen deep cuts, like "Potion Approaching" from 2011's Suck It and See, peppered in between hits like "Do I Wanna Know" and "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor."
"We've been having fun playing some of them tunes. We've been playing 'From the Ritz to the Rubble' [from the band's debut] a bit this summer," the singer says. "That's been enjoyable."
I ask him about his relationship to the band's earliest material, songs the now 36-year-old frontman wrote when he was a teenager. "If I take the words out of it, it might be easier to have that discussion," he says. "I think there's something in the feel of how the songs played and performed on the record, and the musical ideas, that make me feel a certain way that I think I can still relate to. Even if I do get out of breath sometimes when I'm playing them."
After a rise as rapid as the tempos on their first two records, each album the Sheffield, UK, quartet have released since seems to slow the pace a few BPMs more than the previous one.
"That's something that's coming back to bite me 15 years later," says Alex Turner, the band's singer, guitarist and primary songwriter, of the physicality involved in playing the band's early hits today. "After our third album [2009's Humbug], everything starts to get a bit looser. We just haven't been writing the kind songs that require that kind of tempo."
The lunar expedition of 2018's Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino added exotica and jazzy pop orchestration, setting the stage for The Car, the band's earthbound seventh album. It completes the evolution of Arctic Monkeys — singer-guitarist Turner, guitarist Jamie Cook, bassist Nick O'Malley (who replaced Andy Nicholson in 2006) and drummer Matthew Helders — from naïve teenage rabble-rousers to wizened and occasionally cynical elder statesmen.
The Car began life as a photograph. Taken by Helders, it showed a single vehicle parked on an otherwise empty rooftop parking lot, shot from a long distance. "I've wanted to see that image on a record cover since before I'd written the record," says Turner, speaking with Exclaim! on the phone from London. A blown up version of the picture hung on his wall while writing what would become its soundtrack. But Turner seems to have not considered its influence on the album until now. "I think perhaps it was in the back of my mind more than I realized," he concedes. "There's definitely a few times where lyrics drift into a kind of surveillance place, and they share that feel with that picture."
The album luxuriates in itself: intentional and slow-moving. Turner's voice, which once rattled off bon mots in rapid-fire sing-speak, has evolved into a Bowie-esque croon, perfectly paired with the album's orchestral arrangements, especially on lead single "There'd Better Be a Mirrorball." Its pace makes big moments feel bigger, like the blasts of sound on "I Ain't Quite Where I Think I Am." Yet, similar to Pulp's dark masterpiece This Is Hardcore, there's a sinister edge that adds a dash of tension to even the album's most tender moments, as if Turner and his bandmates are knowingly staring down the last days of decadence even as they pour themselves another glass of champagne.
He calls the record's various musical elements "characters." "The band kind of play a few different roles, and so do the arrangements," he says. Mixing those characters, trying to figure out how much of each one was necessary for each song, proved to be a challenge. "We were way in the weeds, like probably deeper than on any of the other [records] that we've made," he admits. "Sculptures of Anything Goes," the most electronic track on the record, took a particularly circuitous route to its final form, one that wasn't far removed from where it started. "There are times when it feels like the rock band is sort of on one fader side, and it comes up briefly and then disappears again."
Turner speaks in short, clipped phrases. He is thoughtful, if non-committal; new thoughts often overtake old ones before the latter can be fully articulated. Asked if there's any intended meaning to the album's title, its title track, or the fact that cars are a recurring image in the album's lyrics, Turner offers: "It does crop up a few times in lyrics, to the point where I noticed. I don't know if I could live with myself if I missed the opportunity to call something The Car, and they told me upstairs they wanted something punchy this time after the last one. So I was kind of trying to kind of give them that."
Arctic Monkeys were huge before they'd put out their first album. One of the only bands to benefit from both the rapid rise of online fame via file-sharing and old-school media outlets' coverage of that rise, their debut, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, was the fastest-selling album in UK chart history. While they've enjoyed a solid following in North America since the beginning, the groovy thump of 2013's AM unexpectedly blew them up into an arena-sized attraction. Turner was then being referred to as the greatest songwriter and lyricist of his generation — all of which made Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, a series of vignettes set in and around a fictional lunar colony, so confounding to the band's newly expanded fanbase.
Still, every one of their records has debuted at No. 1 in the UK charts, a stunning feat for an independent band, especially one so willing to throw out what's worked in the past and chart their own sonic course. So it was a bit surprising when "505," a deep cut from the band's 2007 album Favourite Worst Nightmare, found a new audience on TikTok. The 15-year-old track, never a single, is now the band's third-most played song on Spotify behind a pair of AM songs, with over 830 million streams.
"You would be forgiven for thinking that any of the songs from any of the records could bubble up to the surface," Turner says. "But I don't think that is the case." He points out that the song has always been a live favourite, often closing their main set. "I don't think you get that thing that you just described happening if it's not already kind of got that status in live shows to start with."
Like any band with a long career, Arctic Monkeys have lost a lot of songs along the way, dropped from their set with the band having little intention of ever playing them again. "We've gone far enough down the road that I don't think anything's off-limits in the catalogue, if you'll excuse me calling it that," says Turner. Indeed, the shows leading up to The Car's release, the band's first in three years, have seen deep cuts, like "Potion Approaching" from 2011's Suck It and See, peppered in between hits like "Do I Wanna Know" and "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor."
"We've been having fun playing some of them tunes. We've been playing 'From the Ritz to the Rubble' [from the band's debut] a bit this summer," the singer says. "That's been enjoyable."
I ask him about his relationship to the band's earliest material, songs the now 36-year-old frontman wrote when he was a teenager. "If I take the words out of it, it might be easier to have that discussion," he says. "I think there's something in the feel of how the songs played and performed on the record, and the musical ideas, that make me feel a certain way that I think I can still relate to. Even if I do get out of breath sometimes when I'm playing them."
