The new Arctic Monkeys album and what's left of indie Britrock, Indie Sleaze and a new artistic identity that defies definition
"I love it when artists don't care what people will think and do exactly what they want": this is the first comment that appears below the youtube video of Arctic Monkeys' new single Body Paint from the album The Car out today. After a good four years of waiting since Tranquillity Bates Hotel the Yorkshire lads are finally back, a little aged perhaps certainly changed, but no less expected. A nostalgic 60s aesthetic, Turner's long hair styled in a Bob Dylan style, random grainy images appearing on old screens, and a sound much closer to Five Out of Five than Fluorescent Adolescent.
They have done it again, the more we ask them to go back to their roots, to the Britrock soul of their first album, Beneath the Boardwalk, the more they devote themselves to experimentation, to virtuosity, to their artistic needs rather than to the whims of the public. And yet, despite their radical aesthetic and musical change over the years, both for long-time fans and for Gen Z who discovered them thanks to the virality of TikTok (I want to be your vacuum cleaner was a viral audio for most of 2022 while the hashtag #ArcticMonkeys counts 3 billion views), Arctic remain the epitome of a time when Skins was the most-watched TV series among teenagers, Alexa Chung was the it-girl par excellence and Tumblr was the most loved social network.
An aesthetic that for Arctic officially ended with the release of AM, when Alex Turner created a rockabilly persona, with hair gelled backwards a la Elvis Presley, total black leather looks, tailored suits, vintage accessories and highly emotive trousers. In 2018, the phrase, 'I always wanted to be one of The Strokes', opened Tranquility Base Hotel. One of the only snippets that managed to leak out during the album's month-long launch, it became a symbol of an album that was perhaps too intellectual for those accustomed to Teddy Picker's hard-edged sound, a further artistic step from Why'd you only call me when you are high?, which had itself been branded too pop.
From the indie-rock legacy of the Monkeys now remains the Reddit bands, a different sound from what everyone expects, nostalgia and an Alex Turner cult that by the sixth record's end has become more of a creative and cultural movement. The truth is that at the threshold of forty, Arctic may be something different from the suburban kids we knew, but we'll always remember them that way: with drab clothes and disarming charisma, young and unconventional as only rock can be.