Photo by Sofia Guaico on Unsplash
The British alternative rock band, The Arctic Monkeys, has released an album announcement and a new single after a 4-year hiatus. The first snippet of their upcoming album, The Car, coming out on Oct. 21, is the release of their lead single, “There’d Better Be A Mirrorball.”
The Car will soon become the band’s seventh studio album to date. Although only the lead single has been released to the public so far, this time it seems easy to predict the creative direction that the Arctic Monkeys are striving for. Admittedly, the single sounds incredibly familiar to those who are dedicated fans of the band, in the sense that it resembles the sound of their previous record, “Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino.”
For many fans, the similarities in sound between “There’d Better Be A Mirrorball,” and the songs in “Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino” are pleasant but unexpected, especially considering their trajectory. In the last 20 years that they have been together, the band’s appeal to the public has centered around their ability to achieve a distinct sound for every studio album they release, which surprisingly, might not be the case with their newest release. For instance, their massively popular album AM, released in 2013, taps into a psychedelic rock sound, while the following album in their discography, Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino leaps into strikingly different genres such as lounge rock and jazz.
Much like their previous work in Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino, their newest single “There’d Better Be A Mirrorball” features intriguing synth sounds, a delicate composition on drums and strings, and Alex Turner’s vocal and lyrical arrangements at the forefront of the song.
However, it would be unjust to reduce their new single to just a song that would perfectly fit into their last studio album, regardless of how similar the production might be. Although the theme of their upcoming album, The Car hasn’t been fully revealed yet, the themes in the lead single fully contrast the sound explored in their previous album, which indicates to the audience that the two projects will be massively different.
Without a doubt, the release of Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino in 2018 was an experimental step in Arctic Monkeys’ career. The singer-songwriter of the band, Alex Turner, created a record that played with the idea of what it would be like to visit a luxury hotel on the Moon and the many political implications that this sort of escapist resort would entail. The sci-fi-influenced theme was unexpected for the band to explore at the time, as their previous work stemmed from real-life situations that Turner had gone through.
Similarly, the lyrics and the overall theme in “There’d Better Be A Mirrorball” are more grounded in reality. The song describes the gut-wrenching pain of saying goodbye to a lover, from the perspective of Turner being walked back to his car. As he does this, he is pleading with his lover to take a minute to make sure there is a mirrorball- or in other words, that his lover takes him for one last dance under the light of a disco ball, before their final goodbye.
If Arctic Monkeys’ new single is an indication of the theme for their new record, it will be interesting for the band to create a piece of work that is realistically heartbreaking, while maintaining the out-of-this-world sound that they have established since 2018 in Tranquility Base Hotel And Casino. The Arctic Monkeys’ newest track, “There’d Better Be A Mirrorball” is heavily recommended to any open-minded music geeks who want to hear heart-breaking lyrics, a striking piece of lounge rock, and the sound of a beautiful ballad-like string composition.