STACK #216 October 2022

FEATURE MUSIC

Los Angeles home, the musician returned to his six-stringed companion to draft The Car 's melodic motifs. “There are a couple [of songs] that were written on the guitar,” he says. “I can’t really say that about the previous record. "I think there are things on this record you can draw a line from those older Monkeys records," he adds, though the most manifest of these connections was less about the music itself, and more about the man's anxiety or anticipation around the music. “I’ll be honest… I feel like every time we’ve done a record – certainly for the last ten years – there’s been a period where it felt like it's not going to make sense,” he says. Seven BRIT Awards, an Ivor Novello and a Mercury Prize will attest that the Monkeys always did and continue to make perfect sense, but Turner is loath to spend his time looking dreamy-eyed into the past. "Sometimes during [tour] rehearsals, we play some of the old songs, and then I am occasionally persuaded to look back on how young we once were with a twinkle in my eye," he smiles. "But I try not to get carried away with it.” on howyoung we oncewere with a twinkle inmyeye Sometimes [I] look back

Images of La Frette Studios, Paris. Credit: lafrettestudios.com

F ifteen minutes outside of Paris, in the little town of La-Frette-sur-Seine, through a disorderly tangle of dappled trees and mossy vines, is the 19th century mansion which houses La Frette Studios. While its haunting exterior might suggest Miss Havisham’s spectre hovers nearby, the

manor’s stately, rococo-plastered rooms thrum with life – and with music. It was here four years ago that singer songwriter Alex Turner and his band Arctic Monkeys recorded their sixth consecutive UK number one album Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino , and it’s where they returned earlier this year to record parts of this month’s follow-up, the comparatively simply-titled The Car . Sophisticated, moody and sometimes blithe – with easy-like-a-Sunday-morning

mysteriously fromTurner's perspective, as if still half-hidden in the ivy crawling over La Frette’s façade: “It feels to me… there is some kind of big production going on in the background,” Turner muses. “I’m not entirely 100 per cent sure what it is. There is something being created… and that perhaps allows us to explore ideas. There’s the feel like we’re preparing something.

kit, syncopated piano chords and Turner's voice stretching luxuriously into its rich, vibrato flow – The Car is the Sheffield act’s seventh album, and Turner describes it as distinct from its predecessor in the groove of process. “There’s a feel, on that last record,” he ponders. “[It’s] a feeling of experimentation or

“Which, of course, we know we are: we’re making the record,” he concedes. “But I wouldn’t say [ The Car ] is about making a record.” La Frette Studio wasn’t the only

[ The Car is] not an experiment. It's natural

character returning to the AM fam for this bewitching opus. Lassooing producer James Ford into the fray was a no-brainer, says Turner: “I don’t know who else could get me out of this mess at this point,” he says of his The Last Shadow Puppets bandmate (who has previously worked with Gorillaz, Foals, and Florence + the Machine). There was another (less sentient) presence integral to sessions even earlier in the The Car 's creation: the guitar. While the entirety of Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino was famously written by Turner on a Steinway Vertegrand piano at his

something. [This album is] not an experiment. It’s natural. And I think that comes across.” That the process was more organic seems to make it more difficult to describe; Turner struggles to pinpoint how The Car 's parlour rock panache unfolded. “I can’t tell you how… I got there, exactly,” he says. “It could have been as simple as a piece of equipment [that] led us there. There are less occasions where we are showing each other a song and saying, ‘Let’s try doing a song like this’… this record is less time spent with any references. “Of course, they’re still there,” he admits, though he won’t name names. He’s even reticent to identify books or films he absorbed during the LP's writing, though he does mention reading late crime-fiction writer Raymond Chandler... then clarifies that the seminal novelist did not influence the album's material. The Car ’s themes emerge similarly

Arctic Monkeys on the grounds of La Frette Studios, during the recording of Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino (2018) Credit: Zackery Michael

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