The 10 best Arctic Monkeys songs of all time
I wouldn’t be so bold as to say that the Arctic Monkeys have been the best band to emerge from the rubble of the century so far, but the Ritzy buggers are certainly in the top one. They smashed the hinges off of the saloon doors of the 2000s indie scene with a debut that made not believing the hype seem like a dullard’s folly akin to doubting the roundness of the world. Thereafter they’ve led us on a merry journey through genres, energies and hairdos. Behold the very best of the boys from Sheffield.
Resplendent with the agile beast behind the kit, a drummer equally adept at thundering through 165 BPM and taking a backseat to tap out a jazz rhythm and let the melody do the leg work; the uber-cool Jamie Cook with his understated guitar beds that springboard the tracks into sonically structured oblivion; the rolling rhythm engine from the ever-inventive Nick O’Malley; and, of course, the ‘band-guy’ Baudelaire presiding over the creative heart of the Sheffield scallywag assortment, Alex Turner.
Their sound constitution is perhaps the secret alchemy in their arsenal—they are a band in the true sense of the word. This aura of brotherhood and fun is a throwback to the days when the likes of Tom Wolfe would proclaim, “You’re either on the bus or off the bus,” and Arctic Monkeys have always been interesting tour guides. They have invigorated the cultural zeitgeist and transcended the lives of their fans, escaping the dimension of their music alone.
Their wavering styles and shifting impact make their back catalogue a particularly tricky trove to appraise. However, by the same token, it also makes it an interesting task. Ultimately, it offers up the pertinent point that no band in recent history has offered up such consistent quality, with such confidently imaginative evolution, resulting in a top ten that is all but arbitrary beyond purveying the scope of their catalogue. A variated catalogue that spans all corners of your record collection and moods.
The 10 best Arctic Monkeys songs:
10. ‘Suck It and See’
There’s nothing new under the sun in the world of love songs, that is, unless you’re Alex Turner and your romantic lexicon involves the dustiest beverage in the fridge of your local corner shop. In truth, while that opening poetry is unique, it’s not all that astounding, but when you accompany that with the crunchy chopped chord strumming, you get an aura of cinematic atmosphere that elevates it.
It teeters on the brink of being saccharine, but Helders offers up just enough muscularity to the rhythm section to save it from that soppy fate. With guitars dropping in and out to offer up dynamic texture and a solid middle eight, the boys craft a beautiful composition that seemed to swell, mellow-out in sparse near-melancholy reversing hum, and expand again mimicking the emotional flux of love itself. It’s clever and quirky in equal measure, but the true triumph is the sticky, sweet refrain at the centre of this Humbug.
9. ‘Perfect Sense’
The Arctic Monkeys’ seventh album is a strange beast. There are times when even the most ardent fans of their recent music crave a chorus or a catchy hook, then the moments sweep in where it all makes, well, not to be too crony but, perfect sense. This supreme finale showcases the songwriting development of the band. It’s a piece of music that James Bond composer Monty Norman would be more than proud of, complete with a brooding lyrical atmosphere lifted straight from the literary depth of John le Carré.
Sweeping and poetic, the song rises to the occasion and closes the album in style—a canny knack that the lads have accomplished on all of their LPs to date. Turner croons notes out of nowhere that threaten to lull Sputnik out of orbit, and the band coalesce in such a way that can only be described as Monkeysesque. The brimming joy of glistening originality – that so few are capable of – knocks you off your feet and whizzes you off to dreamy cloud nine to hear about Turner’s warped vision of La Riviera or some ski chalet in his listless imagination. It’s a sultry bed of sound and symbolism quilted in a duvet of sexy eudemonia.
8. ‘One Point Perspective’
When Guy Garvey of Elbow was appraising the work of his friends in the Arctic Monkeys, he declared that ‘One Point Perspective’ was the best track that they had ever done. Given the song’s quirky postmodernist stylings whereby lost trains of thought play out literally in the top line, and kooky rhythmic flourishes create a fresh dynamic, it’s easy to see why he views it highly as a fellow songwriter.
The track’s unusual tones and structure now seem like the signpost that pivoted the band towards their latest angle. However, aside from the reinvention, the aspect that proves most astounding is the level of creativity on display. How many other songwriters could craft a hit that rings out over Glastonbury while mingling autobiographical musings on the existential dread of an ageing Rockstar, with philosophical sci-fi akin to Kurt Vonnegut and a musicological collision of Soviet space-lounge sounds and indie melodies?
7. ‘That’s Where You’re Wrong’
And here we have yet another fever-pitched finale. ‘That’s Where You’re Wrong’ might just be Arctic Monkeys’ most underrated song to date. With ethereal Johnny Marr-like tremolo guitar riffs whizzing around your headspace, a bassline that could rattle a filling loose, and a sweet butter-cutting melody that could have every single one of a centipede’s toes a-tapping, the song proves to be a musicological masterclass.
For all Alex Turner’s lyrics and performative ways might be a central tenet of the band, one of the most refreshing things about ‘The Monkeys’ is that they remain an ensemble. It is, without doubt, one of Turner’s greatest attributes as an artist that he isn’t unhinged by his own sense of individualism and is always happy to celebrate the artistic vision of others. In this closing anthem, every member seems to come to the fore in a melee of instrumentation and unified intent. Everything straddles that same paradoxical finely tuned looseness that The Doors achieved before them, proving that hard graft has never sounded more effortless. Perhaps the lesson for us mortal sinners is whether it’s all that hard when you’re having fun anyway?
6. ‘Dance Little Liar’
Humbug represented the first major fork in the road aboard the Arctic Monkeys bandwagon. They took a left-field turn down last laugh lane and shed a few leeching vampires in the process, leaving the foolhardy to bask in the munificent harvest of a new artistic pasture.
Although their debut and sophomore might have differed, the realm of desert rock placed the gang literally a world away. It might not have offered up the most immediate joy for many fans, but in time, it is almost the record that a lot of us are most thankful for as it introduced us to more new names than ever before—adding to the sense that we’ve all grown up and navigated the journey of adulthood with the gang behind the wheel.
This bold step had to be met halfway, but once you entered, the depths proved bottomless, and the boon was bountiful. Amid the swirling guizer of desert grooves, ‘Dance Little Liar’ proved to be an era-defining epic for Turner in his most mystic guise, like some sort of shy, affable Jim Morrison. With a crescendo akin to the adrenalised final throes of ‘A Certain Romance’, this swampy Breaking Bad-like tale reaches a shimmering shower of notes that few songs have matched since ‘Marquee Moon’.
5. ‘505’
Another strength of the Arctic Monkeys is that they are undoubtedly a great live act. In an age when so many songs are trapped in the studio, it’s a refreshing feat to be able to thrash them out live and not lose any of the engineered magic. The steady build of ‘505’ is frighteningly simple, and the composition is far from new, but try seeing if the arena crowds care about that as mascara is sent streaking, pints levitate through the air, and the euphoria of reminiscence is served up on a silver platter of stunning duelling guitars.
That’s the beauty of the band in many ways; while it might not necessarily fulfil this list’s premise of crowning the very best from an artistic standpoint, this track has become a staple of their oeuvre. There is an emotive connection in its current welter that always proves affecting in some way. When you couple that with Turner’s ability to rattle off a dexterous vocal topline, you’re onto a winner.
4. ‘Do I Wanna Know?’
Turner is a songwriter who understands the ways of the world and man. He also has the talent to illuminate these observations in song and cast them in the colourful hue of lustrous wordplay. On any given record that he has been part of, there’s a slew of psychological introspections that prick a nodding ear. Quite often, these shrewd observations are about the relationship between a handheld device and alcohol, but that shouldn’t detract from the fact that he’s clearly a man with his finger to the pulse of our twisted constitutions and how the times morph them.
Constructed sparsely, instruments slow dance in the background as Turner croons hardboiled Raymond Chandler-esque home truths about nights being made to say the things that scuttle away in the gaudy light of day. Sleek and assured, this fresh era welcomed many new fans into their realm with good reason: it had more sex appeal than the History Channel’s view of Cleopatra. Along the way, it proved just how amorphous the great genre-meddling band can be. Somehow, they hybridised hip-hop and indie without sounding like pretty fly white guys, a triumph of coolness in itself.
3. ‘Brianstorm’
Imagine having to follow the most successful debut album in the history of British music? With the release of ‘Brianstorm’ pressure was abated like a window being shot out on a Hollywood aeroplane. With a blitzkrieg of drums that blast off at a rate of knots that make a listener’s forearms weary from listening alone, the song offered a shot of adrenaline that proved they were the antithesis of a flash in the pan in less than 2:52.
This riotous salvo of youthful exuberance was a flare-gun blast of originality. The frenzied strumming separated them from the more considered swagger of indie imitators that they inadvertently spawned in their wake. And it also signposted another important factor: not many bands were following them into this heavier terrain because not many other acts were capable. The musicianship on display is, frankly, superb. And of all the songs in their back catalogue, it was this one that garnered the most respect from their musical peers.
2. ‘I Bet You Look Good on The Dancefloor’
‘I Bet You Look Good on The Dancefloor’ has outgrown itself, and that makes it particularly difficult to place. However, imagine, if you will, hearing this anthem for the first time once again. Hell, even if was released tomorrow, nearly two decades on (scary thought), it would still blow a Suzie Q-shaped hole in this so-called age. Mostly, that comes down to its unburdened barrage of youthfulness. It thrives on the viscera of joie de vivre that only youth can harness and that will forever uphold it as fresh.
Aside from that, its chant-along chorus taps into some sort of involuntary sing-along gene. This drunken resonance has indelibly woven the track into society at large. It is at one with other universal anthems like ‘Common People’ and ‘Hound Dog’, entwined somewhere in the DNA of culture’s carefree, jubilant, three sheets to the wind side.
To this day, it still fights for the title of the greatest debut single of all time. In one fell atom-splitting moment, the band suddenly not only made sense of the working-class adolescence that lay ahead of many fans but coloured it with the fluorescent palette of piled-up passions in a poetic punch-up of visceral rock ‘n’ roll and snarling lyrical introspection. In fact, they achieved all that to such an exacting extent that an entire generation can recite every single lyric; How many songs do you get like that in alternative music these days? In fact, how many entire albums do you get where lovers and loathers alike know it by heart without anyone truly being sick of it?
1. ‘A Certain Romance’
On January 23rd, 2006, Alex Turner, Matt Helders, Jamie Cook and Andy Nicholson, released their masterful debut. They almost unwittingly collected the clamouring cacophony of a generation, gave voice to it, nurtured it and unleashed it into the wild like some spotty knackered-converse-clad befringed beast. Like all other ground-breaking debuts, it had absorbed everything that came before it, and then spun it out with sui generis stylings and organic originality, giving youth the chance to champion something that was entirely their own. Proving a lesson long in the learning — from The Beatles to Bowie, Blondie and David Byrne — to be a rock icon, you must first be an iconoclast. Unlike a lot of bands of the era that faded out, Arctic Monkeys were a prototype too rare to die and too talented to stagnate. It may have been a revolution only measurably different from the last, but nevertheless, Arctic Monkeys were the latest luminaries ushering in something ineffably new and organic.
For those who were gladly awoken and swept up in this new wave of indie rock, it forecast all the club carpets that stuck to trainers like the wrapper to a warm Chewitt and offered vibrant exultation, bringing poignant life, poetic drama, and earnest reasons to be cheerful to working-class existence, rather than wallowing in grim cynicism. The visceral imagery in Turner’s early trademark tirades of snarling slack-jawed tongue-lashings was not just the sort that you could easily absorb and cast into a movie-of-the-mind, it was more so the prose material for an auteur director, telling the very tale of the life you were living. It certainly wasn’t dull realism either; it held all the power of a punch-up and all the drama that the fateful crossroads a coming-of-age proves to be.
‘A Certain Romance’ crowned this all in a glorious conquest. We all knew the tales that Turner was speaking of, we just never lassoed the words to crystalise them in the amber of nostalgia quite so poetically. However, the album closer seemed to somehow know its place in cultural history, leaving us mortal sinners with no choice but to utter cheesy lines like: ‘as corny as it sounds, it seems like he’s singing about the life around me’. In this regard, it was powerful Dylanesque folk, happy to be for the proletariat—to lube up the gears of a long-deserved weekend and soundtrack a defiant new zeitgeist. There is a timelessness that will live on to pastiche of the line “over there, there’s friends of mine,” which is just as well, considering ‘A Certain Romance’ may well be the last of its kind—the last joyously unpretentious offering of collectivism that defines an entire generation with poetic sympathy rather than the cool kid stance of cynically singing for the chosen few in a manufactured gang spawned from the fractured internet age where all the friends have moved online.
