Few, if any, bands have had to content with the levels of anticipation that met Arctic Monkeys at the earliest point of their career. Barely out of school back in the early 2000s, they were being feverishly described in some quarters as the greatest band of their generation largely on the strength of some demos they’d posted on their MySpace page.
That Arctic Monkeys not only fully justified the hype with their 2006 debut album Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, but then swiftly moved on to pastures new, reinventing themselves time and time again, be it as the long-haired rockers of Humbug or the surrealist sci-fi crooners of Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, is testament to the remarkable talent of the group and their songwriting chief Alex Turner.
Turner has proved his mettle outside of Arctic Monkeys, too: as one half of Last Shadow Puppets alongside Miles Kane, as a producer, and on his – to date – only solo record, the soundtrack to Richard Ayoade’s 2010 film Submarine
Though fans still wanting scrappy indie rock bangers about trackie bottoms and taxi rank cues may have been frustrated by Turner’s artistic evolutions, it’s been a fascinating journey and as our rundown of all of his and Arctic Monkeys’ albums show, one that really has proven Turner to be one of the most gifted and interesting songwriters of the era.
11.
Alexandra Saviour
Belladonna Of Sadness
Columbia, 2017
Sneaking in on a technicality perhaps, but while Alex Turner’s name might not appear on its sleeve, he co-produced (alongside long-term Monkeys foil James Ford) and co-wrote every song on Portland singer Alexandra Saviour’s overlooked 2017’s debut. Indeed, while you might not be able to hear Turner’s voice on Belladonna Of Sadness, his fingerprints are all over it. A sister album of sorts to his escapades in The Last Shadow Puppets, its retro swish positioned Saviour as a hybrid of Nancy Sinatra and Lana Del Rey and both the smoky late-night setting and calibre of songs such as Girlie could have earned them a home on any of the last three Arctic Monkeys records.
10.
Alex Turner
Submarine
Domino, 2011
Comedian Richard Ayoade had directed several music videos for Arctic Monkeys as well as 2008 concert DVD At The Apollo. Returning the favour, Alex Turner wrote six songs for Ayoade’s directorial debut proper, Submarine. The original plan was for Turner to record English language Serge Gainsbourg covers but he found they lost too much in translation and instead opted for a set of hushed acoustic songs whose drizzle-soddened northern romanticism nodded to another Turner hero, Richard Hawley. The result is perhaps the most unsung gem in Turner’s songwriting chest. He clearly thought so and re-recorded closing track Piledriver Waltz for the next Arctic Monkeys album.
9.
Last Shadow Puppets
Everything You’ve Come To Expect
Domino, 2016
Coming off the back of 2013’s hugely successful AM, Alex Turner took a break from the day job and returned to his side project with bestie Miles Kane. Everything You’ve Come To Expect swapped out the sweeping Scott Walker-isms of 2008’s The Age Of The Understatement for something, while no less sumptuous and string-laden, more jaded. Shades of Bowie, Isaac Hayes and The Love Unlimited Orchestra lit a dream-like drive through pair’s late-night escapades in LA and the ensuing, rueful hangovers. Bar the execrable in-jokery of Bad Habits, the album has aged well over the intervening years and in retrospect was a clear trajectory recalibration towards Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino and The Car.
8.
Arctic Monkeys
Humbug
Domino, 2009
While some may have bemoaned the lack of chip shop queue vignettes on Favourite Worst Nightmare, Arctic Monkeys’ third album was their first major fan-confounding pivot. Humbug found the band ditching their tracky tops and sticky dancefloor anthems, growing their hair out (both literally and sonically) and retreating to the desert with Queens Of The Stone Age’s Josh Homme to discover their inner stoner rockers. It’s a hard-riffing model they would refine to much better effect on AM, and while some of it failed to reach the high bar they’d set themselves, the likes of My Propellor and Crying Lightning still have a delicious, wonky Bad Seeds strangeness to them with the heart-bruised Cornerstone standing as one of the most perfectly executed songs Turner has ever written.
7.
Arctic Monkeys
Suck It And See
Domino, 2011
It’s sometimes easy to overlook Arctic Monkeys’ fourth album, positioned as it was in something of a grey area between the melodic indie rock they’d largely jettisoned on predecessor Humbug and the colossal riffolama they would soon unveil on AM. However, that does a disservice to one of the band’s most consistent and chaff-free records. Lyrically, Turner is experimenting with a light, playful surrealism that both hits (Don’t Sit Down ‘Cause I’ve Moved Your Chair’s hilarious schoolboy dares) and misses (the aforementioned Piledriver Waltz’s “I etched the face of a stopwatch on the back of a raindrop” is sub-hippie guff unworthy of the author of A Certain Romance). Crucially, however, it’s all delivered within a copper-bottomed set of tunes. The likes of The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala, Black Treacle andShe’s Thunderstorms delivering sparkling melodic love bombs that land regardless of what Turner is singing about.
6.
Arctic Monkeys
Favourite Worse Nightmare
Domino, 2007
Literally no one would have complained had Arctic Monkeys delivered Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not… Pt.2 for their second album. It’s a testament to the band’s confidence, then, that they moved on so swiftly. Favourite Worst Nightmare was the first time they worked with producer James Ford and it delivers precisely because it doesn’t try to emulate its predecessor. The pummelling Brianstorm was the indie rock of their debut on steroids, a withering putdown of the music industry sycophants they endured as next big things, while Fluorescent Adolescent showed Turner’s Play For Today’s eye for a character study was as sharp, if not sharper than ever. Meanwhile, in an era where similarly lauded acts like The Strokes and The Libertines had faltered trying to follow up their own debut albums, closer 505 confirmed Turner as a songwriter of a class unlikely to go anywhere soon.
5.
Last Shadow Puppets
The Age Of the Understatement
Domino, 2008
The Last Shadow Puppets’ certain bromance began when Miles Kane’s first band, retro garage rockers The Little Flames opened for Arctic Monkeys in 2005. Critics might mock the uneven balance of talent in the partnership, but credit where it’s due to Kane for massively widening Turner’s musical vista by turning him on to the likes Scott Walker, ‘60s Bowie, Serge Gainsbourg and Ennio Morricone and, more importantly, co-authoring the brilliant, cinematic sweep of songs that make up the duo’s 2008 debut. The galloping title track, bombastic Calm Like You and My Mistakes Where Made For You’s cheeky appropriation of Scott 4’s The Old Man Is Back Again are excellent, youthful approximations of Walker’s orchestral existentialism, but when the John Barry-ish curtain drops a little for the final two songs – The Meeting Placeand Time Has Come Again – it reveals a pair of bona fide classics entirely of their own mould.
4.
Arctic Monkeys
The Car
Domino, 2022
Much to the chagrin of a certain section of their fanbase, the trajectory of Arctic Monkeys albums usually found them arriving at a place that didn’t sound particularly like the record that had preceded it. The band’s seventh album, however, saw Alex Turner and co. still settled quite comfortably in the sonic surroundings of their sixth, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino. While The Car still dressed itself in a ’70s-styled finery cut from a cloth of Young Americans-era Bowie, Curtis Mayfield, The Beach Boys and Al Green, it dropped the conceptual shenanigans for something Turner had skirted around for much of the past decade: sincerity. Listeners - not to mention television viewers of their 2023 Glastonbury headline set - were quick to realise that there weren’t many indie disco bangers under its hood, but repeat spins slowly reveal The Car to be one of Arctic Monkeys’ finest bodies of work.
3.
Arctic Monkeys
AM
Domino, 2013
Though their talent and chops meant that they turned in fascinating records no matter what musical hat they were trying on at the time, the multiple turns and diversions Arctic Monkeys had taken since their era-defining debut did give the impression of a group still searching for a new identity that really suited them. On AM they found it. On tour of the US opening for The Black Keys, Alex Turner had found himself facing indifferent audiences for the first time since playing half empty Sheffield pubs as a teenager. Aware that he might need some showbiz razzamatazz to win over the uninitiated, he created the transatlantic rock and roll showman who leads their fifth album’s grandstanding slam-dunk of stadium-sized riffs, low-riding G-funk and their most bullet-proof set of songs since Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. Bagging themselves a whole new stateside fanbase in the process, the rise of Arctic Monkeys 2.0 started here.
2.
Arctic Monkeys
Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino
Domino, 2018
Nearly two decades into the band’s career, there’s still a sizable proportion of Arctic Monkeys fans who think that wealthy rock stars approaching 40 who mostly live in LA should still be writing songs about getting into scraps in provincial taxi queues. Thankfully, Alex Turner isn’t one of those people. Having recast himself as a bequiffed stadium rocker on AM, Turner took a quantum leap into another realm entirely for the follow up. Inspired by authors David Foster Wallace and Neil Postman among others, he created the surrealist conceptual prism of a cocktail bar on the surface of the moon to examine the world around him.
A bold move perhaps, but one which he pulled off with a dazzling wit and on-the-nose precision that, not for the first time, put him lightyears ahead of the competition. There had been clues as to Turner’s listening tastes on The Last Shadow Puppets’ 2016 album Everything You’ve Come To Expect - David Bowie circa 1973-75, Serge Gainsbourg, David Axelrod, The Beach Boys – but aided by an expanded set of musicians including James Righton from defunct nu ravers Klaxons, here the music spread out and luxuriated into the perfect lounge settings for Turner’s sci-fi visions. Play the album back-to-back with their 2006 debut and at times you might not be able to fathom that it’s the work of the same band. And therein lies the genius of both Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino and the Arctic Monkeys.
1.
Arctic Monkeys
Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not
Domino, 2006
There are some records so tied in to the time of their creation that it’s hard to extricate them and approach with fresh ears. Listen back to Arctic Monkeys’ debut album nearly two decades on though, and what strikes you is just how exciting and relevant it still sounds. Pop music has made hay from the fact that young people like to go out at the weekends on the lookout for excitement since the 1950s, but few albums have ever captured the experience with such wit and pathos as Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. Alex Turner’s precocious talent as an observer of the lives around him might have been one of the chief causes of the blizzard of anticipation swarming around Arctic Monkeys at the time, but his bandmates - and in particular drummer Matt Helders – displayed a dextrous muscularity that, if anything, didn’t get its full dues. See the thunderous assault that kicks off The View From The Afternoon or how they swing from aggression to tenderness and back again on A Certain Romance, a song that almost singlehandedly justified all the claims of greatness being thrown their way.
The fresh waves of teenagers who turn up to Arctic Monkeys concerts shouting for more songs like Mardy Bum and Fake Tales Of San Francisco are testament to the timelessness of the record: that they feel Turner was saying something unique to them about their lives, despite the fact that they weren’t even born when I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor came out. That they might leave disappointed on that front is down to the fact that Arctic Monkeys nailed this world so perfectly first time around that not even the band themselves could top it.