Arctic Monkeys announce new album The Car and share release date and tracklist

Titles for 10 new tracks have been revealed

Arctic Monkeys will release their new album The Car in October.

The Sheffield rock band – singer-guitarist Alex Turner, drummer Matt Helders, guitarist Jamie Cook, and bassist Nick O’Malley – have announced the forthcoming release of a new record.

The Car will be the group’s seventh studio album, following on from 2018’s Tranquility Base & Casino and 2013’s AM.

It will feature 10 new songs written by Turner and made with the band’s regular producer James Ford.

According to a press release, The Car finds Arctic Monkeys “running wild in a new and sumptuous musical landscape and contains some of the richest and most rewarding vocal performances of Alex Turner’s career”.

In an interview with The Big Issue, Turner spoke about how the record may compare to the intergalactic sound of their latest release.

“On this record, sci-fi is off the table. We are back to earth”, Turner told the publication.

He continued: “I think we’ve got closer to a better version of a more dynamic overall sound with this record.

“The strings on this record come in and out of focus and that was a deliberate move and hopefully everything has its own space. There’s time the band comes to the front and then the strings come to the front.”

Turner, 36, also spoke about the group’s decision not to use a regular recording studio, explaining that they were inspired by some rock-and-roll legends to go in another direction.

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The Car was recorded in the summer of 2021 at Butler Priory, a converted monastery in rural Suffolk.

“There’s a bunch of Led Zeppelin and Stones records where they were in this house in the country and then they went and sorted it all out and overdubbed it elsewhere,” Turner said.

“We went there in the summer, took all the equipment, got the raw material and then took it on elsewhere.”

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The group are due to headline Reading Festival this Saturday (27 August) and Leeds on Sunday (28 August).

Asked whether the band plan to debut any new material this weekend, Turner said that the setlist remains “quite mysterious to me”.

“We are still shuffling the deck on the setlist,” he said.

The Car tracklist:

There’d Better Be A Mirrorball

I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am

Sculptures Of Anything Goes

Jet Skis On The Moat

Body Paint

The Car

Big Ideas

Hello You

Mr Schwartz

Perfect Sense