Arctic Monkeys' Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino signals a change in style, and increasingly absurd lyrics

In 2013, Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner delivered an intergalactic definition of attraction:

“It’s an exploration, she’s made of outer space And her lips are like the galaxy’s edge And her kiss the color of a constellation falling into place”

It was surreal but simultaneously concrete: Here was Arabella, a girl whose beauty outdid the horizon.

In 2018, Turner takes his love for space metaphors to the moon, quite literally. His latest offering, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, is an absurdist album that speaks of living in a dystopian, science fiction world featuring an exodus to the moon (hello, Elon Musk). The band is playing at a luxury hotel where life is devoid of real human attachment.

This time, the mood is not heady and eager like ‘I Bet You Look Good On The Dance Floor’ and the sound is definitely not like the aggressive ‘Perhaps Vampires Is A Bit Strong But…’. Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is a clear shift away from their previous guitar-heavy style, and an indication that the people who sang ‘Fluorescent Adolescent’ and ‘Riot Van’ have grown up.

The music has turned mellow and more reminiscent of the ’70s and ’80s — there’s the distinct keyboard and piano sound (Turner wrote the songs on a piano), jazz and even falsettos. You’ll hear traces of the Beatles and David Bowie. He was influenced by films which had jazz lounge clubs at the centre of their plots, and thought about the interiors of those sets when writing chords for this album. The sound is especially easy on the ears in ‘Star Treatment’, ‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino’ and ‘Four Out of Five’ — perhaps the best tracks in the album.

The band’s lyrical style remains the same, but the subjects it speaks about have changed radically. Gone is the Turner who volunteered to be “a vacuum cleaner, breathing in your dust”. He’s now checking out your social media accounts and wondering why you spend so much time online. In ‘She Looks Like Fun’, he points out how people’s identities have been reduced to labels and hashtags, and how actual human interaction and dissent both don’t exist in the real world anymore.

This song is also Turner’s most hard-hitting criticism of the times we live in. The line “Dance as if somebody’s watching, because they are” isn’t just a clever play on words; it’s the explanation for most things we do today — to show people on social media.

Turner turns meditative with religious and political references ; he has admitted in an interview to Pitchfork that this album contains more of his political thoughts than any of their previous music. And unlike the other emotions he writes about, which are turned into images and metaphors, his sentiments about Donald Trump are hardly veiled in ‘Golden Trunks’: “The leader of the free world reminds you of a wrestler wearing tight golden trunks.” In ‘American Sports’ he talks about how even our relationship with religion is so tied in and dependent on invasive technology: “Emergency battery pack, just in time for my weekly chat/ With God on video call.”

There’s also the looming presence of Batman in this album — an aspect which will remain memorable. Turner uses these references interestingly, such as in ‘She Looks Like Fun’, where he claims to have spent New Year’s Eve in the Wayne Manor. The motif in ‘Batphone’ is that his lover can use this device to contact him if she needs him, in a world where we communicate with and understand people only through screens.

There’s no doubt that this is a work of extremely absurd thought, even if it draws from familiar human experiences. How else do you put a taco stall on the surface of the moon occupied by people who are now gentrifying it? Whether this entire world, in which this album is situated, will appeal to non-fans is questionable.

In the moments when he is being concrete and lucid, Turner is sharp and relevant. Sample this line from ‘Batphone’: “I launch my fragrance called Integrity/ I sell the fact that I can’t be bought.” Just as he makes a definitive point about capitalism, he also talks about information overload in ‘Four Out of Five’ through the concept ‘Information Action Ratio’, which means that we don’t know what to do with the abundance of information we have access to. He also refers to the feeling of inadequacy one experiences when you realise that there is so much to watch on TV, but that you have no time to actually consume any of this content, in the song ‘Star Treatment’.

But the trouble is that he seems to dwell too much on these ideas. He’s said that he finds nothing “sexy” about technology, and we get it. But to dedicate half the songs in an album to directly address it in the exact same way (’American Sports’, ‘Science Fiction’, ‘She Looks Like Fun’, ‘Batphone’) seems excessive.

In ‘Science Fiction’, the band gets brutally self-aware with words like, “I want to make a simple point about peace and love/ But in a sexy way where it’s not obvious.” He says that he wants to have the same effect on his lover the way science fiction does, but fears that his song “may well just end up too clever for its own good.”

Perhaps they have, and not always in a good way.