When Arctic Monkeys sprang into the charts 16 years ago, they did so with a hurtling energy and an album name borrowed from Alan Sillitoe’s novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. At the time, the band’s lead singer, Alex Turner, explained their reasoning: the record’s stories were similarly drawn from the threshold of the weekend – one foot in the hopeful glamour of the previous night, the other in the plain reality of the morning after. In the years since, it’s been hard not to also regard the title of Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not as a statement of creative intent: a desire to buck musical expectation, to not repeat whatever came before. Across six albums the band have moved wilfully from indie to rock to funk to, on their last outing – 2018’s Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, a collection of songs that married Serge Gainsbourg and the Beach Boys.
That Sillitoe spirit carries through to the band’s seventh album, The Car, a record that returns us to that Janus-like space in which Turner’s songwriting thrives, and performs yet another stylistic flip. Produced by James Ford, who has worked with the band since their second record, Favourite Worst Nightmare, this time the sound is largely strings, sultriness, honeyed soul, Turner taking the lounge singer tradition and twisting it this way and that. For all the retro stylings, the effect is surprisingly contemporary, the lushness tempered by something sour and dark: the electronic growl that opens Sculptures of Anything Goes, the twinkling lope beneath Body Paint, the tension between the wah wah guitars of Jet Skis on the Moat and the mundanity of Turner’s lyrics. “Are you just happy to sit there,” he wonders flatly, “and watch while the paint job dries?”
In the lead up to The Car’s release, much has been made of the evolution of Turner’s voice. In the early days it was lean and hard and northern, sitting somewhere between the nose and the throat. Today it has grown warmer, fuller, with a burnished depth. It’s lighter than that of his clear influence Richard Hawley, and given to sudden upward sweeps, as on the sublime closer Perfect Sense. There are shades of Frankies-era Holly Johnson here, perhaps – or, in its combination of northernness, cadence and soul, Mick Hucknall in Simply Red’s pre-Stars heyday. This is perhaps not a comparison for which the band or Ford were reaching, but nevertheless it produces something irresistible: it’s a pleasure to hear Turner steer his voice so masterfully along There’d Better Be a Mirrorball, all aching, sweet-souled romance.
If Arctic Monkeys’ early songs told of the dramas of sprawling nights out – anticipation, electropop, dancefloors; lotharios, riot vans, jumbled taxi rides home – then the subject-matter on The Car is not so very far removed. They might now talk of the Riviera, jet skis and photo shoots, but the idea remains that there is something awry behind this glittering world of mirrorballs and disco strobes, marble, chandeliers, spotlights. The champagne is travel-sized, the apartment is dusty, the heart is predictably heavy. A lot of the songs on The Car carry an unsettledness – a sense of constant movement, nods to the touring life, and “the business they call show” as Turner sings it. The album opens with a farewell and ends on a goodnight, and in between brings us a series of dislocated scenes and flickering images – climbing up this, jumping off that, “singing in Spanish on Italian TV sometime in the future”. In the sublime Hello You, we’re carried on a brief rural journey that feels like a breath of fresh air – overtaking tractors, waiting for the road’s winds and bends to level out, “picking your moment on a country lane, the kind where the harmonies feel right at home”.
It’s impossible not to feel immersed in such imagery. The Car is an enormously tactile record, full of strange textures – a lint-roller runs over velveteen, body paint clings to legs, arms, face, and tears are cried in a tanning booth. Things may look glamorous, but it all takes so much effort, and the truth keeps poking through. It’s hard to discern whether Turner is making a commentary here on the life brought about by fame and success, a desire to go back to the start, or whether it’s a riposte to critics’ fondness for wondering whether his lyrical observations can remain so compelling now he breathes the rarefied air of the international pop star. “I’ve snorkelled on the beaches fruitlessly,” he sings on Hello You. “Why not rewind to Rawborough Snooker Club? / I could pass for seventeen if I just get a shave and catch some Zs.”
Perhaps in truth the Arctic Monkeys never belonged in either. Perhaps they are right at home where they are: somewhere mid-air, forever caught between Saturday night and Sunday morning: perfect chroniclers of both.
