with The Car, ARCTIC MONKEYS are putting more miles between themselves and the chip shop verité of their breakthrough sides, with slinky soul and cinematic ennui replacing riffs and ramalam. Is it the perfect getaway from stadium-indie stasis, or are they flirting with the crash barrier? "We're still listening to the same instinct," they assure KEITH CAMERON.

Back to earth: Arctic Monkeys (from left) Nick O’Malley, Matt Helders, Jamie Cook, Alex Turner, outside Lisbon’s Palácio de Justiça, September 2, 2022.

photography by KEVIN WESTENBERG.

IN THE EARLY SUMMER OF 2021, JAMIE COOK INVITED Alex Turner round to his place for an evening. Drink was taken. At some point, they did the thing that musicians always insist they never do: listen to their own music.

Onto the stereo went the first Arctic Monkeys album, followed by the second Arctic Monkeys album, then the third… On it went, for several more hours and many more drinks, until Cook and Turner had listened to the entire Arctic Monkeys catalogue, in chronological order.

Matt Helders, then en route from the US to England, remembers feeling a bit gut-ted that he missed out. “Happened before I got there,” the drummer nods ruefully. “I would have done it! If we’d listened to them all, together, we’d probably just laugh at some of the musical decisions we’d made. And then buzz off some of them as well. Like, how did we think to do that then? Stumble across this idea that seems kind of advanced for teenagers.”

Neither Cook nor Turner remembers whose idea it was. “We’d had a few by that point,” says Cook by way of explanation. “It was a good laugh, like looking at old photographs. Quite nice. And inter-esting to see how we’ve moved around. There were some funny bits. ‘That were a mad moment, what were we trying to do?’ And some stuff, that I thought wouldn’t sound good, sounded all right. The first record, there’s something about the energy on that. Definitely a bunch of 19-year-old kids, an energy that you can’t fake – and that I feel I can’t do any more.”

Arctic Monkeys were about to check themselves into Butley Priory in Suffolk, a 14th century gate-house to a former monastery, now a venue for hire. The band were familiar with its gothic grandeur: their manager Ian McAndrew got married there, and longtime producer James Ford cel-ebrated his 40th birthday there. Now the Priory had been repurposed by the Monkeys as the recording space for what became their seventh album, The Car, 15 years since their debut Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not in-vested teen spirit with a fresh Sheffield accent, and three since Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino had completely rede-fined notions of what an Arctic Mon-keys record could be: a psychedelic soundtrack to an imaginary sci-fi film set on the Moon in a dystopian retro-future, far from anything resembling rock played by a conventional band.

When the lights go down: Turner and Cook on-stage at Kalorama, Bela Vista Park, Lisbon, September 2, 2022; (opposite page) Alex Turner reflects.

Kevin Westenberg (2)

So the timing of the impromptu drunken listen-ing session was auspicious. What better moment for Turner, the band’s songwriter, and Cook, its guitar-ist and spirit guardian, to assess Arctic Monkeys’ journey thus far? They might even possibly glimpse signposts to their future…

Except Alex Turner had already worked out a route for that.

"PUT ME MOTORBIKE BOOTS ON ONE DAY TO TRY AND WRITE ARER BUT EVEN THAT DIDN'T SUMMON THE RIFF."

Alex Turner

THE TRANQUILITY BASE SPACE ODYSsey ended in South America in April 2019. Still energised by the momentum of touring, there were thoughts of a quick return to the studio. Record a couple of songs, put them out, keep going. The precedent was R UMine?: recorded as a standalone single in January 2012 and released a month later amidst the ongoing promotion cycle of the previous year’s Suck It And See; by March it had made its live debut, and that summer it became the bedrock upon which the next album, AM, was built. Seeing as AM’s beat-heavy Californi-cation of the band’s road-hardened riff manual catapulted Arctic Monkeys to a second-phase commercial peak – Number 1 in the US and UK – it didn’t seem a bad idea to follow the same path.

“The feeling I had at the end of that tour in 2019 was this idea of, ‘Let’s write a song that could close the show,’” re-members Turner. “Whatever that means. As soon as I got off the tour, I suppose the idea of what closing a show is becomes a bit more abstract.”

By the end of the year, they were back in har-ness with James Ford at La Frette, the Parisian studio that provided part of Tranquility’s louche glow. Even at this early stage of the process, Turner sensed this would not be a return to AM, but nor did these latest La Frette record-ings evince a viable new direction. Just one song, Hello You, would make it onto the new album, albeit subsequently re-arranged and re-record-ed. “The rest,” Turner says, “is on the cutting room floor. However, I do feel as though it was part of the story, in that I feel everything sort of influences everything else to an extent.”