Arctic Monkeys explain how all of their albums are connected
If you’ve been following Arctic Monkeys since the very beginning, you’ll have seen multiple different eras from the Sheffield lads. There was the garage rock of their initial days, the moody desert rock of AM, and the quasi-lounge music of Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino. With the first two singles off their new album, The Car, having already seen the light of day, the lounge era of Arctic Monkeys seems to be ongoing.
But if you ask the band, all of their work has fit into a continuum of their own design. That’s what Matt Helders and Alex Turner explained to the Dutch radio station NPO 3FM in an interview that was released earlier today. The pair said that, despite being wildly different in terms of style and tone, all of the band’s LPs have basically the same DNA.
“There’s a path that goes from the first album to this album,” Helders explained. “It might not be obvious and clear to everybody at first, but for us, it’s definitely got a bit of that. And it’s got another extension of what we did last time, but there’s definitely a difference.”
“I think it seems to me possibly that, when you look back after a period of time has passed, you’d notice more that the sound of each record [is] sort of bleeding into the next one more than you perhaps felt it did at the time,” Turner added. “I think it definitely follows on from the last one, but it feels a bit more open or something.”
The pair also debuted a new song, ‘Big Ideas’, during their appearance at the station. All told, we’re getting a more clearly defined view of what The Car looks like when placed against the other albums in the Arctic Monkeys catalogue. Spoiler: it’s a lot like Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino, with a dash of The Beatles thrown in. If you were digging that, great! If not, the guys assure you that it’s still the same guys in the same band making the same music. Everyone wins.
Listen to Helders and Turner’s interview down below.
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