Can we expect new music from Arctic Monkeys in 2025?
It all went quiet on the Arctic Monkeys front, eerily so, until this week. The engine of The Car has sputtered to a halt, leaving a beat of pregnant silence.
Alex Turner has turned the improbable age of 39 years old, resulting in a legion of fans feeling older than they could’ve ever possibly imagined, despite still breaking hearts with the efficiency that only youth can harness. With lusty anticipation abounding, the one question sounding off louder than many regarding music in the year ahead is: Can we expect anything new from the Arctic Monkeys in 2025?
It is telling that one of the most searched questions related to the beloved Sheffield band is presently, ‘When did the Arctic Monkeys break up?’. To casual fans, the low profile the group has upheld since the release of The Car back in October 2022 might make it seem that they have, indeed, parted ways. Well, they might be scattered across the globe these days, but they are still very much a unit. But are they an active unit on the brink of putting out anything new?
While a little over two-and-a-half years isn’t a great deal of time for an established band to take between records, especially with a world tour and a Glastonbury headline slots in between, their absence is certainly felt. In the interim, since The Car, old touring partners Inhaler have called them “the greatest rock band in the world”, Damon Albarn asserted that they were “the last great guitar band”, and The Hives called them “the only good popular band”.
Thankfully, at last, it appears all is well within the Arctic Monkeys camp despite the silence over their future and little rumblings in a public setting. Behind closed doors, as Companies House records show, there has finally been movement, and speculation that album eight is in the works has now entered a state of overdrive.
Are Arctic Monkeys making a new album?
On August 6th, eagle-eyed fans noted that Arctic Monkeys had removed all references to their 2022 album, The Car, from the homepage of their website. It has been replaced by a logo, signalling that the chapter has come to a close. They also added a link to their newsletter on the homepage, suggesting that new developments are on the horizon.
Speculation regarding a new album began on August 5th, when the X account, Has It Leaked, which has a history of reporting on industry secrets and boasts more than 47,000 followers, posted: “Arctic Monkeys, despite solo projects, studio sessions booked for November.”
Has It Leaked also speculated that a full summer tour would occur in 2026, but admitted this was “me guessing and hoping” rather than based on information.
Additionally, on August 6th, only a day after reports of a new album being in the pipeline surfaced, Alex Turner, Matt Helders, Jamie Cook and Nick O’Malley registered a new limited liability partnership, Bang Bang Recordings LLP, on Companies House.
The four Arctic Monkeys band members previously dissolved Bang Bang Tour Services LLP on April 1st, suggesting they don’t have any plans to tour in the near future. As it stands, no new limited liability partnership has been filed on Companies House, suggesting they have no current plans to tour in the immediate future.
While it’s inconclusive whether Arctic Monkeys are currently in the process of making a new album, the legal filings seemingly confirm that they remain active and are looking ahead, at least in a legal sense, to the future.
The Arctic Monkeys-shaped hole in music
While there might have been some incredible albums that could question the validity of those claims in the last two-and-a-half years, none have been able to garner the pandemonium that the Arctic Monkeys are capable of. They remain alternative music’s most viable main stage headliner, and whether you love them or loathe them, it is undeniable that the music industry is a better place with them as an active unit. And there are glimmers of hope that those days will soon return.
Upon the release of The Car, Turner expressed caution over taking quite so long to make a record in the future. “It took us a lot longer to get to the endpoint of this one than any of the others. I suppose because we had a bit more time,“ he said Belgian radio station 3FM. Adding:
“Maybe the longer you let it go on, the more you want to let yourself make adjustments. Perhaps all of that might have got a bit silly at the end in that respect”.
Alex Turner
He also made it clear that the band didn’t intend to have another four-year break, as they had done with 2018’s Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino and their latest release. Moreover, Turner explained that the band learnt plenty of new “tricks“ in recent recording sessions that should speed things up in the future. Most enticingly of all, their calendars are free, and Tom Rowley – now pretty much an ordained member of the band – has been uploading cryptic photos of recording sessions with Loren Humphrey, another recent Arctic Monkeys collaborator.
While there are evident signs that the Monkeys might be moving towards new music, as mentioned above, no press releases have been disseminated, and nothing official has been announced. Moreover, with their last tour extensively filmed but not much coming to light from it, perhaps it’s an accompanying soundtrack that’s in the works. There are also murmurings that their usual road crew were told a break from the road lies ahead. But maybe things are simply quietest before the storm—at least, that’s the way it has always been for the band.
So, how might a new Arctic Monkeys album sound?
The beauty of the band so far is that each new release gets increasingly hard to predict.
So, if we’re being speculative for a bit of fun, then we may as well get very speculative. Last time out, there was potentially (or almost certainly since the account has now promptly been made private), a leaked Spotify profile belonging to Turner (or his long-term girlfriend and musician, Louise Verneuil) that regaled us with sounds adjacent to The Car’s sleazy lounge ouevre in the build-up to the release. Now, with that cruelly stripped away, we have nothing but two decades of fandom to guide us.
On that front, I figure we’d all do well to disregard The Car as a bit of a red herring. It was a record blighted by Covid-19, Matt Helders proclaimed that he was “pleasantly surprised“ by fans’ reactions to the record, and all the talk that followed was to express a focus on a quick and differing follow-up.
While there is no doubt that Turner has acquired a love for the verbose modes of classic French chansonnier stylings and an admiration for Scott Walker-like grand, schmaltzy production, there will unquestionably be a fresh mutation of this recent habit. Especially with a band likely to sport at least seven members moving forward.
But the emphasis is on ‘fresh’. Any hopes of an album akin to the singalong chorus ways of their debut seem as doomed as expectations of the world reversing the trend of climate change in the immediate future. Their latest tour even made it clear to the masses that they are a different band now—not one who has abandoned their past but one who has boldly moved on from it.
In fact, choruses of any kind may well be missing moving forward, as they largely were on The Car. This move didn’t seem like a novel blip, but rather a continuation of what was hinted at with TBHC and Last Shadow Puppets efforts like ‘Everything You’ve Come to Expect’—a step beyond post-modernism where the pop song is liberated from its need to return to a central point, free to roam around an unfurling narrative.
And as for those mystic narratives, what might they be? Well, TBHC was a record that saw the band delve deeper into sociology than ever before. Tracks like ‘Golden Trunks’ pretty much predicted the most recent US election, and the information: action ratio is a study that seems increasingly pertinent. While The Car turned away from this newly philosophical bent, the world (and the band) was still gathering itself after the pandemic—now, even for a typically apolitical band, a bit of commentary on the crooked modern age seems impossible to avoid, especially for a mind as feverish as Turner’s.
It is this presentiment that fills the forthcoming album with the most potential. The crowning triumph of the group in recent times is that they have still maintained their lofty status while developing their sound in completely unexpected ways. The only group to come before them that has sustained a figurative ‘headline’ status while switching from work as radically different, and yet still identifiable as the same band, as Whatever People Say I Am and The Car is The Beatles. That is a monumental feat. Say what you like about their two latest releases, you’d be hard-pushed to claim you’ve heard anything quite like them before—certainly not on the Pyramid Stage at 11pm at least.
It is a great oddity of modern times that while we live in an age where most culture fanatics would argue great music still readily abounds, there is no expectation that one of these great releases could ever eclipse something like Sgt Pepper’s in terms of transcendence. However, perhaps this is exactly what the Arctic Monkeys are poised to challenge the predicament, whether in 2025, 2026 or otherwise.
With Turner’s wit reconciling the noisy world, the band’s sonic experimentalism positioned to bring something grand and new to a condensed and backwards glancing playing field, and the post-post-modern ethos of abandoning typical pop structuring in favour of a chorusless cascade of prescient, meandering poetry, AM8 might just revivify our reactions to culture and hit upon the reverence witnessed in bygone days.
We don’t know how it’ll sound entirely because it is reinvention that keeps great artists immortal, and Arctic Monkeys are coasting on that same trajectory. In an age that so desperately needs music to surprise us again, who better to blaze up the latest beacon of musical revolution than the band who promised to never stop evolving on their debut EP when they sang, “We’ll stick to the guns / Don’t care if it’s marketing suicide / We won’t crack or compromise / Your derisory divides / Will never unhinge us“.
