Sheffield Still Knows How to Make an Entrance

There was a specific kind of party, sometime around 2006, where the Arctic Monkeys were inescapable. Not in a bad way—in the way that a song can own a room so completely that you stop noticing it’s playing and just feel whatever it is it’s making you feel. I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor. When the Sun Goes Down. Alex Turner’s deadpan delivery, all that compressed wit and suppressed desire. They sounded like they’d figured something out that nobody else had.

They were part of a wave—Bloc Party, The Strokes, The Killers—that brought honest, unselfconscious rock back into rooms that had forgotten what it felt like. But the Monkeys always had something the others didn’t quite manage: they kept getting stranger. Humbug wrong-footed everyone. AM shouldn’t have worked as well as it did. They were never just doing what was expected of them, which is rare enough to be worth noting.

Five years since their last record, and now they’re back with Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino and the lead single Four Out Of Five. It’s a different energy—slower, more lounge-lizard than leather jacket—but it’s still unmistakably them. Turner singing about a lunar hotel with the same dry authority he once used to describe a Sheffield street corner. The cool hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s just moved to a different postcode.