Friday 21st October. A package lands on the doormat. Could it be? The previous day’s postal workers’ strike had put doubt in my mind. It was the right size and shape. All the signs were good. I opened it. YES! It is!

The new Arctic Monkeys album!

Yes, I know I could get it on Spotify or Apple Music, but I always like to own things that are important to me in a physical form if I can. Maybe, as someone born in 1992, I’m part of the last generation that doesn’t automatically go digital with everything. The CD will live in my car, appropriately enough given its title.

This will be my ‘review’ of The Car, the seventh studio album to be released by Arctic Monkeys. Just don’t expect it to be an impartial review. In case you’re not already aware, I LOVE Arctic Monkeys. I mean, look at the photo above! I’m wearing an Arctic Monkeys t-shirt, I’m holding an Arctic Monkeys album and on the wall (my bedroom wall) behind me are framed prints of each of their previous albums and their track listings. It sounds like a cliché, but Arctic Monkeys have been the soundtrack to a large part of my life. The lyrics speak to me. Their songs have helped me through tough times and accompanied me at high points. I’ve been to The Grapes in Sheffield, the pub where they played their first gig, and I have also seen them play live in their home city. I even had my photo taken next to an Arctic Monkeys-themed elephant sculpture (evidence provided below).

The last decade has seen us fans have to wait a long while for new material from our heroes. After the phenomenally successful album AM was released in 2013, there was a near five year wait until its follow-up Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino arrived in 2018. The tour for that album came to an end in the spring of 2019, and the now familiar silence from the Monkeys began. We did get a pandemic treat in the form of a live album, Live At The Royal Albert Hall – a recording of a 2018 concert released in December 2020 with all the proceeds going to charity – but otherwise the band were on hiatus.

In August 2021, reports that Arctic Monkeys had been recording at Butley Priory in Suffolk made the NME. The band had enjoyed the experience of all living and recording together under one roof on their previous album when they used La Frette studios just outside Paris to put their sci-fi inspired masterpiece together, so it was not unexpected to hear that they’d taken over what is essentially a wedding venue for their next record. Butley Priory’s website referred to hearing “the double bass, drums and piano wafting out of the open double doors”, indicating that this album would likely be as light on heavy guitar as their last.

Then, the trail went cold again. In November last year, an announcement was made that Arctic Monkeys would be playing a small number of shows in Europe in August 2022, starting in Istanbul, Turkey. The months passed, that first date came and we still had no new music. Some people were even questioning if the band would actually be performing in Istanbul. YouTube footage confirmed that they definitely did, and served up a selection of hits with no new songs. They continued to do this on subsequent tour dates until 23rd August, when they played I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am for the first time. At last, we had an idea of what the seventh album might sound like.

A day later, the lid was finally lifted. The new album would be called ‘The Car’ and it would be released on 21st October. I pre-ordered my copy on CD immediately. The track listing was also released, with ten songs. Click on the title of one to hear it:

There’d Better Be A Mirrorball
I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am
Sculptures Of Anything Goes
Jet Skis On The Moat
Body Paint
The Car
Big Ideas
Hello You
Mr Schwartz
Perfect Sense

Unlike the last album, which had no singles released from it at all in the build up, we did get to enjoy some of the songs from The Car before 21st October. As 29th August became the 30th, I was eagerly awaiting the release of There’d Better Be A Mirrorball (click here to read something I wrote about it a while ago). Going by the title alone, I was expecting something with a kind of 70s groove, but it is actually a wonderfully concise break up song. Frontman Alex Turner has addressed the end of a relationship before, but in Do Me A Favour from 2007’s Favourite Worst Nightmare he did it in a far more aggressive way. In Mirrorball, he’s approaching it in a more mature manner. The song actually turned out to be extremely indicative of what the rest of the album would be like – Turner would reveal in interviews that the brooding intro to Mirrorball opened his eyes to the direction this new material was going in, and the theme of a break up or a goodbye runs throughout the album.

I Ain’t Quite Where I Am gets as close to the groove I was expecting from Mirrorball with its guitars, then Sculptures Of Anything Goes is a gorgeous tune that contains these lyrics:

Puncturing your bubble of relatability
With your horrible new sound
Baby, those mixed messages ain’t what they used to be

Sculptures of Anything Goes

I wonder if that might be aimed at the ‘fans’ of the band who felt isolated by the direction the Monkeys went in with TBH&C. Those complaints have always annoyed me. The first Arctic Monkeys album was released in 2006, when they were still teenagers. The tales of nights out in Sheffield would sound ridiculous now they are closing in on 40. The band have grown up, and so have their music. I doubt they would have remained relevant for as long as they have had they tried to replicate their first album time after time, and if they had done that they’d look as ridiculous as Green Day.

The Car isn’t an album of songs that you can dance to, but I would argue that it is never its intention. I put it on in my car and I am transported to another world – these songs take me somewhere, away from the stress and anxiety I feel most of the time. While it felt like it took a couple of listens to the previous album to go through a sort of ‘wall of understanding’, the effect of The Car was instant – by the end of my first play-through I was hooked. I’ve listened to little else in the last week and I am nowhere near being remotely bored by any of these songs.

It strikes me that this album contains no filler at all. Usually at least one song will be one you don’t remember too much about and don’t come back to after a while, but The Car is incredibly strong throughout. The closest it gets to filler is Jet Skis On The Moat, but even that contains a catchy chorus with the lines:

Is there somethin’ on your mind
Or are you just happy to sit there and watch while the paint job dries?

Jet Skis On The Moat

Body Paint was the second single to be released. Its repeated chant of “still a trace of body paint, on your arms and on your legs and on your face” towards the end is guaranteed to be belted out by crowds for years to come and we’ve just discovered that it sounds bloody amazing live:

The use of strings on this album blows me away. They never feel like they are fighting with the rockier aspects of the tunes, the band has managed to pull off making them sound like they complement each other. The title track, The Car, sounds wonderfully cinematic thanks to its use of strings.

My personal favourite song on the album is the epic Big Ideas. These lines are a fantastic contemplation on the act of songwriting:

I had big ideas, the band were so excited
The kind you’d rather not share over the phone
But now, the orchestra’s got us all surrounded
And I cannot for the life of me remember how they go

Big Ideas

The instrumental at the end is simply beautiful. Arctic Monkeys had actually convened much earlier than the Butley Prior sessions of summer 2021 to attempt to record some new material, pre-pandemic, and everything they did then ended up on the cutting room floor – everything apart from Hello You, the most upbeat tune on the record. We are then introduced to a mysterious character called Mr Schwartz, who we are told is “stayin’ strong for the crew”. Finally, a wondrous way to close an album, Perfect Sense tells us:

If that’s what it takes to say goodnight
Then that’s what it takes

Perfect Sense

You’re not inside the world of The Car for long – the album is over and done with in about 35 minutes. But boy, have I loved being inside that world. Yes, I know I’m a massive Monkeys fan and that this would have had to have been a really poor album for me to say anything else but, truly, I think it is a masterpiece. Its overtones of farewells have got some fans wondering whether this is the band signing off after 17 years at the top, but I really hope that isn’t the case. This is a band who have more stories to tell, more avenues to explore. I’m going to see them at Carrow Road, the home of my beloved Norwich City Football Club, in June next year and I couldn’t be more excited.