Description
Label Review.
2018 album also available in CD.
Our Overview.
‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is the long awaited 6th studio album from Arctic Monkeys; their first release since 2013’s ‘AM’ and finds the band intent on continuing to explore new musical terrain with each album. Frontman Alex Turner on this album swaps his guitar for a Steinway piano, an unexpected gift for his 30th birthday from a friend, in a press release he explains “It was quite a rush, really,” Turner recalls of its unveiling. “Prior to that point I didn’t really have many ideas, and in my memory, that was the point at which they started to come. I really do think sitting at the piano tricked me into writing a lot of this stuff.” He had gotten to a point with the guitar where he knew where everything was going to fall. “Sitting at the piano took me immediately to a different place,” he says. “There are chords that came out, my fingers were falling different places, and the sounds were giving me ideas. That I was the guy sitting at the piano also gave me ideas.”
Turner’s new instrumental playground resulted in Arctic Monkeys’ most ambitious album to date. ‘AM’ was sonically different from 2011’s ‘Suck It and See’, and he was encouraged by that to take yet another turn. “With the commercial success of the last record,” he says with a pause - briefly tripping over the words “commercial success,” as if it were a foreign phrase - “I don’t think I felt the pressure of that hanging over the creative process. But there was a pressure, in that we step it up and do something different again - try and fly high.”
Arctic Monkeys have been flying high since the arrival of the band’s racing 2005 debut album ‘Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not’, which became the fastest-selling debut album in U.K. chart history upon its release, and earned a Grammy nomination for best alternative music album. On each LP since, Turner established himself as an ingenious lyricist who can cinematically capture a specific moment in time.