There is a version of Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino that sounds like a joke, and a version that sounds like one of the strangest, most self-assured pivots in recent rock history — and which one you hear depends almost entirely on whether you've stopped expecting Arctic Monkeys to be who they were in 2006.
Alex Turner recorded the bulk of this album essentially alone, at home, on a Steinway piano in his Los Angeles living room. That detail matters more than almost any other biographical fact attached to this record. No room full of engineers, no Sheffield grit, no Jake Doyle behind the kit hammering away at something tight and hungry. Just Turner, a piano, and a concept that had been gestating quietly for years — a fictional hotel and casino built on the moon, sometime in an indefinite near-future that feels suspiciously like a disco-era past.
The Room Where It Happened
The sessions that produced the actual record moved to Rancho de la Luna in Joshua Tree, with producer James Ford — Turner's long collaborator, the man who has shaped the Monkeys' sound since Humbug — overseeing the translation from demo to album. Matt Helders is here, but restrained, almost ghostly in the mix. The rhythm section breathes rather than drives. Nick O'Malley holds the low end with his usual quiet reliability, but the dominant instrument throughout is Turner's Wurlitzer, his Rhodes, his voice doing this new thing where it drops an octave and starts sounding like someone doing a tribute act to himself.
The late-night jazz club atmosphere is no accident. Turner has spoken about Serge Gainsbourg, about Scott Walker, about the kind of records that make more sense at 1am than at noon. There's something of Bowie's Station to Station-era cool in the sequencing, and something of Face Value-era Collins in the way the drums enter late and leave early. The influences are worn openly, not as costume but as conversation.
The Songs Themselves
"Four Out of Five" is the one that gets played on lists about this album, and it earns its place — that chorus is genuinely infectious, and the guitar line Matt Helder's percussion locks into feels like the record briefly breaking the surface for air. But the album's actual center of gravity is something like "She Looks Like Fun," which is more unsettling than it sounds, or "Batphone," which is almost confrontationally slow and strange.
"Star Treatment" opens the whole record with Turner murmuring I just wanted to be one of The Strokes over a Rhodes figure that barely moves. It is either the most self-aware or the most self-indulgent opening line of the decade, and I've gone back and forth on this many times. I've landed on self-aware. The joke is in on itself, and there's something genuinely moving about a musician that successful admitting that kind of longing out loud.
The album was engineered by Toti Gudnason, whose work in the low end gives the record that slightly underwater warmth — nothing is too bright, nothing jumps out of the mix unnecessarily. It sounds expensive in the way that only actually inexpensive-feeling recordings ever do, which is its own kind of magic.
You won't love this record the first time. Some people never do. But put it on after the house goes quiet, lights low, something cold on the table — and there's a good chance it becomes one of those albums that belongs to a specific version of a specific hour, irreplaceable and a little strange.