Every time Arctic Monkeys predicted the future in ‘Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino’
In a not-too-distant future, where the moon has undergone colonisation, gentrification, and transformation into a luxurious resort, you’ll find retro-futuristic lounges alongside opulent, meticulously arranged psychedelic music. These strangely endearing sounds are characterised by vintage keyboards and inspired by timeless classics such as the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson. This is precisely the backdrop for Arctic Monkeys‘ album Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino, where Alex Turner and his fellow band members assume the position of the hotel’s in-house band, with music and lyrics that predicted numerous real-world events in more ways than one.
Set within the confines of a room Turner nicknamed ‘lunar surface’, much of the album’s lyrics took form during a period characterised by Turner’s formidable bout with writer’s block. The year was 2017, and the band’s previous offering to the world was the acclaimed AM, which naturally raised the bar to dizzying heights in terms of fan expectations for any subsequent release.
That year, Turner was fresh off a tour alongside Miles Kane following The Last Shadow Puppets’ second album, Everything You’ve Come To Expect, when he underwent a transformation. His appetite for crafting love songs waned, supplanted by a newfound fascination with science fiction, space-age pop, and the realm of hyperrealist satire. This new source material enabled Turner to simultaneously adopt an inherently nostalgic approach while ingeniously future-gazing to a new world.
The curtains to Tranquility Base open with ‘Star Treatment’, a song Turner wrote about feeling lost and unsure, which was also inspired by Federico Fellini’s 8½. As he navigates, reaching for something he can’t quite touch, Turner sings: “Everybody’s on a barge floating down the endless stream of great TV”. Television consumerism has been the subject of concerning discourse for many years, but there’s something particularly haunting about Turner’s barge metaphor that hits close to home. “You can’t help but get on the barge every now and again,” he explained, “but I like to keep an eye on it.”
Since the onset of the pandemic in 2020, the world has experienced a continuous cycle of digital-first experiences and overwhelming levels of consumption. In ‘She Looks Like Fun’, Turner alludes to this with his cynical line, “No one’s on the streets /We moved it all online as of March”. Interesting, considering the fact that the UK went into its first official lockdown on March 23rd, 2020. Of course, Turner couldn’t have possibly predicted – or imagined – the ferocity of the Covid pandemic back in 2017 or even 2018, but insight like that seems a little too accurate.
In 2018, Donald Trump’s presidency was in full swing, providing a year full of complete and unrelenting motion for the controversial figure. Turner isn’t usually one to get too close to the fire when it comes to political discourse, but he got in the ring for ‘Golden Trunks’, a song where he re-imagines the “leader of the free world” as a “wrestler wearing tight golden trunks”. Delivered with a deliberately Disney-style vocalisation and melody, Turner effectively foreshadows the hilarity of Trump’s forthcoming downfall, even though the song more broadly discusses a love affair with a woman through various abstract musings.
Despite its somewhat tongue-in-cheek deliberations about dancing around in underpants and running for government, ‘One Point Perspective’ seems to conceptualise the bleak arrival of a dystopian society, one where “the apocalypse finally gets prioritised”. The British government, with deals like Brexit, have deliberately made decisions over the past few years that have negatively impacted a lot of the public, from inflation and prejudices to the energy and housing crises. In this song in particular, Turner discusses a turning point where society faces consequences of actions made by the elite: “By the time reality hits, the chimes of freedom fell to bits /The shinin’ city on the fritz /They come out of the cracks, thirsty for blood.”
There was also once a world where we didn’t even think about taking business meetings or personal catch-ups on video calls, but apparently, Turner was already in that mindset when he was writing the album. During ‘American Sports’, he alludes to the plague of digital applications, with the lines: “Can I please have my money back? /My virtual reality mask is stuck on ‘Parliament Brawl’ /Emergency battery pack just in time /For my weekly chat with God on video call”.
In ‘Science Fiction’ and the album’s titular track, Turner also grapples with the ambivalence and complexities associated with extraterrestrial life and the rise of technology, along with its impact on the human psyche. He rather amusingly claims that “technological advances really bloody get me in the mood” while offering discussions about “the rise of the machines”.
There’s a prevalent theme that digitalisation, otherworldly life forms, or some larger entity beyond humanity might eventually lead to what Turner describes as “mass panic in a not-so-distant future colony”. In recent years, we’ve observed the impact of technological advancement on our mental and physical health, concerns regarding AI and its implications for personal data and copyright, as well as significant developments in our understanding of extraterrestrial possibilities. This wealth of information can expand our intellect into uncharted territories, but it also raises the idea posed by Turner: could it simply amount to nothing more than “More brain shrinking /Moving images”?
We’ve arrived at a clear crossroads in contemporary celebrity culture, driven by the continuous emergence of exposing stories and revelations. Currently, it appears that numerous scandals continue to surface, prompting society to introspect about the behaviours it once condoned. One of the standout tracks on Tranquility Base, ‘Batphone’, cleverly battles with this culture using the idea of a bat phone as a conduit to informational accessibility. Turner also criticises celebrity culture’s relationship with integrity when he states, “I launch my fragrance called Integrity /I sell the fact that I can’t be bought.”
Of course, the entirety of Tranquility Base and its ability to look to what the future holds could be attributed to its source material: science fiction accurately pinpointing future developments isn’t a new pattern. Moreover, artists, authors, lyricists, and writers have been discussing anxieties surrounding technological advancement and aliens since the dawn of storytelling. But what makes Tranquility Base so acute in its futuristic lamentation is Turner’s ability to stick together a number of varying lines and thoughts while still remaining true to basic instinct.
Most of the events that the album insinuated have been about dark, even traumatic notions – our lack of control when it comes to technology is well documented in both historical and fictional accounts. However, there’s also something relatively comforting about the unknown, even poetic – as Turner says himself with a rather romanticised lens: “As we gaze skyward, ain’t it dark early?”
