The lead single from Arctic Monkeys’s seventh studio album, The Car, is uncharacteristically lush and melancholic, awash in strings, keyboards, and the gentle patter of Matt Helders’s drums. Sonically, “There’d Better Be a Mirrorball” evokes vintage film scores like those of Piero Piccioni and the lounge pop of Burt Bacharach or Richard Hawley, while frontman Alex Turner croons in the upper reaches of his vocal range. The track centers around a failing relationship, as Turner imagines his final moments with his beloved are accompanied by light reflecting off of a mirrorball.
Much of The Car is filled with similarly lush, downbeat tracks that evoke a bittersweet nostalgia. While 2018’s Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino also displays a yearning for the past, The Car diverges from its predecessor in both its earnestness and sonic grandeur. Many tracks here, such as “Body Paint” and “Perfect Sense,” are slow burners that luxuriate in their instrumentation.
Throughout the album, Turner sings in an upper register a fair amount, which, though effectively expressive and pained, can grow wearisome after a while. It doesn’t help that, despite creating a pleasant and enveloping atmosphere, some of these songs—the title track and “Big Ideas” in particular—suffer from a lack of dynamic momentum.
The psychedelic “Hello You,” on the other hand, buzzes along to a tropical rhythm and an infectious musical refrain that lodges itself into your psyche. The strings, synthesizers, and Turner’s vocals and keyboards swirl around each other as the song builds toward a swooning climax. Elsewhere, moodier tracks like “Jet Skis on the Moat” and “Sculptures of Anything Goes” are infused with traces of vintage soul, driven by slow, sinuous grooves.
Of all of the album’s tracks, the latter is most like Arctic Monkeys’s recent work, with its skeletal instrumentation, rumbling keys, and cryptic lyrics about drinking coffee with “not-long-since-retired spies.” But The Car barely acknowledges the garage-rock sound that made the band famous in the mid-2000s. The direction they’ve taken here finds them flexing their muscles in a way that sheds the cheeky irony of Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino in favor of a more plaintive earnestness, while at the same time building on that album’s sense of adventure.
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