Arctic Monkeys will return on October 21st with their seventh album, The Car. While the band’s announcement did not arrive alongside a single, they did debut the new song “I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am” on Tuesday at Switzerland’s Zurich Openair festival.
The Car features ten new songs written by frontman Alex Turner and produced by longtime collaborator James Ford. To record the album, the Sheffield-born quartet decamped to Butley Priory in Suffolk to lay down the bulk of the material before polishing it at RAK Studios in London and La Frette in Paris.
As Turner explained in an interview with Big Issue that dropped alongside the announcement, “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. We went there in the summer, took all the equipment, got the raw material and then took it on elsewhere.”
Related: Arctic Monkeys Release ‘Live At The Royal Albert Hall’ From 2018 Benefit Show [Stream]
The Car arrives as Arctic Monkeys’ first album since Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino in 2018. While fan-shot footage of “I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am” could support a continuation of themes from the 2018 LP, Turner says that lyrically “on this record, sci-fi is off the table. We are back on Earth.”
“I think we’ve got closer to a better version of a more dynamic overall sound with this record,” Turner said. “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.”
Arctic Monkeys’ upcoming album The Car is available here for pre-order on a variety of formats including a deluxe LP on grey vinyl. A custard-colored album will also be available at independent record stores. Scroll down for the full tracklist and album art shot by drummer Matt Helders, as well as a fan-shot video of “I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am” at Zurich Openair last night.
Arctic Monkeys – “I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am” – 8/23/22
[Video: Shony]
