The cultural impact of ‘AM’ by Arctic Monkeys
In the early 2010s, Tumblr reached peak popularity. With a newfound, unparalleled power over online subcultures, it became the defining platform for what was cool and what wasn’t. By 2013, indie grunge had found its home on the site and photos of American Apparel tennis skirts, screencaps from Submarine, and point-of-view shots of platform Dr. Martens were almost guaranteed to garner thousands of notes.
The indie-grunge aesthetic was in, and so was the sound that accompanied it. Gloomy, guitar-driven bands like The 1975, The XX, and The Neighbourhood found themselves in favour with a new crop of indie rock enthusiasts, who featured them in countless 8tracks playlists. But one band prospered from the rising popularity of the aesthetic more than any other.
Led by a slick and smug frontman in Alex Turner, Arctic Monkeys were one of the first bands who found their fame on the internet. After accidentally acquiring an audience on MySpace in the early 2000s, the band’s tendency to accrue unintended online adoration continued well into the 2010s, and AM marked the peak of it.
In between images of Lana Del Rey and cigarettes bearing fake-deep quotes written in biro, it was hard to avoid Arctic Monkeys-based content. The iconic, minimalist, AM radio wave artwork was printed onto endless t-shirts, and Turner’s widely shared love letter to Alexa Chung raised expectations for hopeless romantics everywhere. Turner’s persona and the band’s wider artistry effortlessly lent itself to the Tumblr crowd.
AM was also the perfect sonic match for Tumblr’s latest obsession. It contained all the mundanities and poetic lyricism of their previous work while also delving into darker and sonically cooler territory. Blending rock sensibilities and lovesick lyricism with hip-hop-inspired beats, it was an embodiment of the dark romanticism that online subcultures craved. Turner described it to NME as sounding “like a Dr Dre beat, but we’ve given it an Ike Turner bowl-cut and sent it galloping across the desert on a Stratocaster”.
AM also elevated the kitchen-sink lyricism of Turner’s previous work, pushing it into more polished, poetic places to match the more studio-focused production. ‘No. 1 Party Anthem’, for example, follows the mundane experience of attempted flirtation at a party through beautiful phrases like, “The look of love, the rush of blood, the “she’s with me”s, the Gallic shrug”. It gained bonus points for indie-grunge buzz phrases like leather jackets and indoor smoking – this combination of mundanity and beauty permeates the record.
Each song played into some part of the online culture that was thriving at the time. ‘Knee Socks’ mirrored the fashion of the time period, and John Cooper Clarke’s words in the opening of ‘I Wanna Be Yours’ were endlessly rebloggable. ‘Arabella’ contained all the celestial romantic hope held by every Tumblr teen, while ‘Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High?’ embodied the glamorisation of drinking and drugs. The album was at once isolated and desperately romantic, much like the culture it soundtracked.
Tumblr users fuelled the success of AM, but the album also elongated the prevalence of the surrounding aesthetic. Just ten years on, with the revived interest in Arctic Monkeys, nostalgia already seems to be arising for the era of AM. It’s rare that an album acquires such a distinct cultural and aesthetic impact surrounding it, one which remains to this day. The release of AM almost certainly encouraged the purchase of a few leather jackets and pairs of knee socks, while the indie-grunge subculture made it one of their most commercially successful records.
