The album artwork for The Arctic Monkeys’ seventh album, The Car, was something of an accident, according to the band’s lead singer, Alex Turner. It’s a long-range shot of a vintage white saloon car parked atop a nondescript city building, rows of Hopper-esque windows in the background, looping tyre marks in the foreground. The band’s drummer, Matt Helders, was responsible for the image. “When he took that photo he was probably not intending it to have anything to do with the Arctic Monkeys,” Turner recalls. “I had a hunch when I saw it for the first time that it should be the next record cover.” It’s a mildly compelling shot, the type that might be nestled three photos into an Instagram carousel of a trip to America. It was perhaps most notable for rustling up press ahead of the release; people located the building (somewhere in Los Angeles), the model (it’s probably a Toyota). The artwork, it turns out, is a pretty apt reflection for the album: pleasingly random, just the right amount of mystery, but also pretty straightforward.
We were primed for something more difficult. The band’s last album, 2018’s Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, took an abrupt left-turn after 2013’s blockbuster AM. The stadium rock anthems were replaced by something altogether more experimental, spacier, and for the first time, hip hop-infused. Guitars made way for synths. While the 2018 left-turn was a thrill, and a necessary change of pace after AM’s enormous Stateside success, it likely didn’t win new audiences for the band. It was a little spiky, a little intellectual. (There’s a reason why AM’s tracks go viral on TikTok, though it’s sometimes by way of a Miley Cyrus cover.)
While promoting this new album, the band has spoken about how their albums connect and influence one another, creating a Venn diagram-overlap of influences and sounds. The first single,"There’d Better Be A Mirror Ball", certainly sounded like it fit within the world of Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino. But one of the most pleasant surprises about The Car is how much it shares its predecessor’s eccentricity, without that record’s off-putting aloofness. The 10 tracks dabble in weirdness – there are songs about showbusiness and performing in Spanish on Italian TV – but it never overwhelms them, or their cohesive, warmly retro sound. There may not be any outright radio hits, but the album will sound good playing in your car, preferably on a sunny drive with no traffic.
The writing is as inventive as ever, the main reason why the band has risen through the ranks of English rock. Many lyrics would likely end up on Tumblr, if Tumblr were still a thing: “Is that vague sense of longing kinda trying to cause a scene?”; “You know it’s alright if you want to cry”; “Put your heavy metal to the test, there might be half a love song in it all for you.” With Turner’s trademark intonation – not really a Sheffield snarl, though not full Californian drawl – those sentiments never veer too emo. There are also, inevitably, quite a few cars, channeling a sense of archaic masculinity but also intimacy: on the title track Turner announces, both fond and fed up, that “it ain’t a holiday until you go to fetch something from the car”; on ‘There’d Better Be A Mirror Ball’, Turner sings about the climactic moments of a night out, the possibility of walking a date back to the car (how that date ends is never revealed).
It’s a supremely fun record, scattered with images of jet skis, “stackable party guests”, and splatters of body paint. What does it all mean? Who knows. There are traces of lost love, meditations on regret, prolonged analysis of stage and screen, but it’s also just a lot of fun, and crucially, funny. “A travel size Champagne cork pops and we’re sweeping for bugs in some dusty apartment,” Turner sings on “The Car”, a delightfully mundane sequence that cuts the subject matter (a coastal holiday) down to size in an instant.
The Car rewards an immersive, uninterrupted experience. The way things go these days, it’s more likely to be split into Spotify playlists, curated both by algorithms and wistful teenagers, which is fine, too. It’s as easy listening as The Arctic Monkeys are ever likely to be. As Turner sings on “Jet Skis On The Moat”: “Are you just happy to sit there and watch while the paint job dries?” With this album on in the background, you might just be.
‘The Car’ by the The Arctic Monkeys is out 21 October
Henry Wong is a senior culture writer at Esquire, working across digital and print. He covers film, television, books, and art for the magazine, and also writes profiles.
