Arctic Monkeys Start Over

After a huge hit album, Alex Turner decided to ditch guitar riffs, listen to jazz and write a science-fiction opus

- Jonah Weiner

The first arctic monkeys album in five years is lush and claustrophobic at the same time – it calls to mind a guy going a little nutty in a small room in a nice house on a hill, constructing a fantasy world in his head and setting his visions to piano. Which, to hear Alex Turner tell it, is more or less exactly how Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino was born. It’s mid-April, and the Monkeys frontman has descended from his home in the Hollywood Hills to a cafe for breakfast. It’s barely 10 a.m., but he’s wearing a crisp, vintage tan suit – safari pockets, flared legs – as he slides into a booth: “Christian Dior,” he says.

Turner started writing the new album at home here in 2016, sitting at a Steinway Vertegrand piano that his manager bought him as a birthday present. Turner, who’s long admired the stylistic shape-shiftings of John Lennon and David Bowie, wanted to do something that sounded nothing like the last Monkeys record – the platinum-certified AM, full of snaking guitar riffs and heavy grooves. Having never written on a piano before, he thought the Vertegrand might shake loose a new sound, and he was right: “The places my fingers would naturally fall on the piano” lent themselves, he says, to progressions and “jazz turns” that “suggested this idea of a lounge-y character, which never would have occurred to me had I been playing a guitar.” Other influences included Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson and the jazzy score that François de Roubaix composed for Jean- Pierre Melville’s 1967 post- gangster classic, Le Samou