![]() And what’s to come seems quite Turner-centric. And now, five years since the band’s last release, “There’d Better Be A Mirrorball” indicates what is to come. If Whatever People Say I Am’s tagline was a twenty-three year old saying ‘that bird at the gig last night was right fit,’ TBH&C’s tagline would be a forty year old ranting about ‘these kids and their phones.’ With each new release, we’ve seen the Arctic Monkeys age and mature, never clinging to what once was but flowering into what is. ![]() They all capture varying moments in the band’s career, tracing the growth and maturity of its members. No two Arctic Monkeys albums sound the same. While the instrumental changes were rather forthright, changes in tone should be expected from this band by now. Shock that came with the band’s shift in tone was, in this writer’s opinion, kind of unwarranted. The grunge and grit of AM was softened into electric grime, with TBH&C telling this self-aware story of a slimeball abusing modernity for profit, eventually losing everything. This synth-heavy conceptual cultural commentary was not necessarily the material that AM fanatics were expecting. So after a five-year space between AM and TBH&C, when frontman Alex Turner traded his leather for beige suit jackets, put his Jazzmaster down and sat at a Baldwin Discoverer DS-50 to tell stories of the gentrification of the moon, fans became divided. It was all leather jackets, distortion pedals, hair gel, and late nights of pondering half-requited love. AM became synonymous with elements of internet culture in the mid-2010s, with Tumblr especially giving a particular cultural iconography. For many, AM was the entrypoint, the first Arctic Monkeys album that stuck with a demographic that was likely too young to follow the band from their initial 2005 release through 2011’s Suck It and See. Their 2017 release, Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino ( TBH&C or for short), was a sharp sonic turn from the album before, 2013’s AM. Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, Arctic Monkeys’ sixth studio album, released in 2018 Favorite Worst Nightmare balances these hard and fast, hi-hat and tom-drum-heavy tracks like “Brianstorm” or “Teddy Picker” with deeply melancholic ballads like “505” or “Only Ones Who Know,” creating this dichotomy between anxiety and longing that’s so singular to the album. It’s garage rock for the club that tells the tale of a night out from sound alone with its harder edge and intense drums. ![]() Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not sounds like what you hear while standing outside of a grimy basement venue while having a smoke. The group creates these central sound narratives in every record they produce, making each album distinct and iconic in its own right. “There’d Better Be a Mirrorball” – Arctic MonkeysĪmidst the long list of “things the Arctic Monkeys do well,” establishing sonic landscapes within their albums is near the top. With the release of “There’d Better Be a Mirrorball,” their first new track in over five years, the Arctic Monkeys indicate exactly what’s expected: that their new album ‘The Car’ will be unlike anything they’ve done before. ![]()
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