Arctic Monkeys 101 With Alex Turner

Over the last two decades, Arctic Monkeys have evolved from precocious (and historically well-hyped) upstarts to one of the finest working rock bands on the planet—and they’ve done it by finding their own way, no matter the risk. To mark the release of their very subtle and stately seventh LP, The Car, we’ve charted their growth to this point by walking through their entire catalog (and more) with leader and chief songwriter Alex Turner as our guide. For the uninitiated, consider it a warm introduction to a vital body of work; for fans of the band, it’s a chance to hear Turner (also one of the finest lyricists on the planet) reflect on where they’ve been and how they got here. “I think the same thing that links our first and fourth records is what links all the rest of them together,” he says. “It's still following the same hunch—that same set of instincts—as we have all the way.”

Upon its release in early 2006, Arctic Monkeys’ first LP—the ferocious Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not—rode a tsunami of online hype into the record books, becoming the fastest-selling debut in UK history. Neighbors and friends from an early age, the Sheffield outfit—Turner, drummer Matt Helders, guitarist Jamie Cook, and bassist Andy Nicholson (later replaced by Nick O’Malley)—began playing together as teenagers, Turner’s Yorkshire accent and natural gift for street-level storytelling quickly setting them apart in a landscape littered with bands post-Strokes and post-Libertines. “Just the speed of it seems alien to us at this point,” Turner says of their earliest work. “When I think about those songs now, it's not as if they're all in this notebook, in one place; they’re like scraps of paper, crumpled up here and there, all over the place. It feels as if they’re linked with the idea of a concert or a small room, which is where they all existed before they were a record, which is important. I don't think we gave too much thought to the recording studio at that time—it was all about the way we would play them on the stage.” They responded to the newfound attention and pressure at home by almost immediately writing and recording a follow-up, 2007’s Favourite Worst Nightmare—an album that felt like an incremental update, but, for the first time, with the added awareness of an audience. “I think that record, there's a bit of me scratching the head, thinking, ‘What do I write about, where do I go with the lyrics and with any of it?’” he says of LP2. “There are things that I stopped being able to do, I guess. There just wasn't the expectation that as many people would hear the first record, and I think that seems evident in the writing of it all, how it's put together. When the band became popular, the ability to be inconsiderate, I suppose, disappeared to an extent.”

After the release of their first two LPs in such quick succession—and the crush of expectation that came with them—the band’s label suggested that Turner and the band connect with Queens of the Stone Age mastermind Josh Homme, who invited them to his studio in California’s High Desert, Rancho de la Luna. “When he mentioned this idea of going to the desert, I couldn't even picture what that was at the time, so I, probably in a cocky way, was like, ‘Yeah, all right, man, sure, we'll go to the desert,’” Turner says. “My approximate position at that moment was, ‘What difference does it make?’ So we drove out there, and of course, almost instantly, everything seemed to open up and suddenly we were the furthest away from where we'd got to on the first two records. Everything was just literally a great distance away, but also, I think beyond that, and more importantly, it just felt like the possibilities suddenly became apparent, that, ‘Oh, it's not finished, this thing. It can become whatever you want it to be.’” Recording with Homme and producer James Ford in Southern California (where much of the band had relocated), the Monkeys began to thicken and diversify their sound, adding menace (2009’s Humbug), shimmer (2011’s Suck It and See), and, eventually, a stadium-ready swagger that resulted in their most successful outing since their debut: 2013’s R&B-indebted triumph AM. After a period of exploring who they were and how they might continue given the heights they’d reached so soon, they found not just clarity, but a kind of closure, too. “It rebooted the whole thing, didn't it?” Turner says, looking back on AM. “At least in that it showed you that you could continue. I remember feeling as though there's something about this record that's just like the first record, and leaning on that thought: ‘Now it's going to be okay.’ Going into that period, it felt almost as if it didn't have anywhere to go. But after those three records, it felt like it could go anywhere.”

No one could have ever guessed where it went next. After a five-year hiatus, the band returned with Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, a louche and largely riff-less concept album of lounge pop broadcast from the moon. It didn’t just signal Turner’s move away from the guitar and towards the piano, but the start of a new chapter in the band’s story that’s continued with the The Car. If they weren’t taking risks, they wouldn’t be themselves. “Intermittently, you go between this idea that, ‘Oh, it still sounds like the band has got something else about it,’ and an uncertainty about how it's going to be received. But through the process of going between those two things, that idea is compounded. Where do we fit these songs into the show that is put together from all these other records from the past? How is that going to work? How are you going to put this thing that feels like it has a lounge-y jazz sample thing going to hang out with the rest of the things on the set list? But you find a way, and by the end of it, the songs all make their little adjustments and you find a through line. I suppose the thing you've learned from all that is that, at this point in time, where we're at now with The Car, it always seems more different than it actually is. I think it still sounds like the band.”

For years, Turner has maintained a steady diet of side work, experimenting with string-embossed, Morricone-like epics in The Last Shadow Puppets, as well as lamplit bedroom folk on 2011’s Submarine EP, written for the film of the same name. But listen closely to The Car and Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino and you’ll hear the walls between the band and Turner’s interests outside it begin to dissolve—the string arrangements, the gently fingerpicked guitars, the use of negative space. “I think I was naive,” he says. “I think the first time I stepped out to do anything else was the first Puppets record, and at that moment, I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this is totally in its own place and it's going to have nothing to do with the Monkeys and what that was going to turn into.’ And I feel I realize now I don't know if that's really possible, for me anyway. It feels as if everything you do has an effect on the next thing, and sometimes more of it is hanging around on the next thing than even I realize.”