Arctic Monkeys

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Lore & Background

Turner and Helders were neighbours and close friends, and they met Nicholson in secondary school. Turner, who had grown up in a musical household as his father was a music teacher, played guitar in the then-instrumental-only band, with Helders on drums, Nicholson on bass and Jamie Cook as a second guitarist. Initially, Turner was reluctant to be the lead singer, but eventually became frontman as he had 'a thing for words', according to Helders. After a few performances, they recorded demos at 2fly studios in Sheffield; 18 songs were demoed and burned onto CDs to give away at gigs, which were promptly file-shared amongst fans. The collection became known as Beneath the Boardwalk—though it was a bootleg compilation assembled by fans, not an official band release. The group did not mind the distribution, saying 'we never made those demos to make money or anything. We were giving them away free anyway – that was a better way for people to hear them.' The band grew in popularity across the north of England, receiving attention from BBC Radio and the British tabloid press.

Reader's Guide

Arctic Monkeys' significance lies in their role as one of the earliest bands to gain public attention via the Internet during the 'blog rock' era, which commentators suggest marked a shift in how new bands were promoted and marketed. The band achieved wider international fame with their fifth album AM (2013), which topped four Billboard charts and was certified 4× Platinum in the US, winning British Album of the Year at the 2014 Brit Awards. They have won seven Brit Awards, including Best British Group and British Album of the Year three times, becoming the first band to ever 'do the double'—win in both categories—three times. Both Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not and AM are included in NME and different editions of Rolling Stone's lists of the '500 Greatest Albums of All Time'. Their sales in the US alone stand at over 30 million units according to the RIAA, and in the UK they became the first independent-label band to debut at number one with their first five albums.

Did You Know?

• The album title AM was not borrowed from the Velvet Underground's 1985 compilation VU; Alex Turner has stated it refers to the AM radio band.
• Josh Homme contributed backing vocals to 'Knee Socks' and worked on 'One for the Road' for the album AM.
• The waveform on the album cover is a visual representation of an AM radio signal, not forming the letters 'A' and 'M'.
• AM sold over 73,000 vinyl copies in the UK by 2014, though it was not definitively ranked among the UK's best-selling vinyl albums of the entire 2010s.
• The single 'Do I Wanna Know?' was the band's first song to enter the Billboard Hot 100.

The Making of AM: A Studio-First Approach

Arctic Monkeys crafted their fifth studio album in two Californian studios—Sage & Sound in Los Angeles and Rancho De La Luna in Joshua Tree—under the guidance of longtime collaborator James Ford and co-producer Ross Orton. Frontman Alex Turner described the project as far more of a 'studio album' than the live-room feel of 2011's Suck It and See. The band laid down bass and drums first, prioritizing groove, and drummer Matt Helder frequently reconfigured his kit in unconventional ways to coax out new textures. New instruments entered the palette: a Hohner Guitaret, a celeste, and a vintage drum machine all appear on the record. Guest vocalists Josh Homme, Bill Ryder-Jones, and Pete Thomas added their voices to various tracks. Turner called Homme's roughly thirty-second contribution—recorded as a friendly 'back scratch' after Turner had sung on Queens of the Stone Age's ...Like Clockwork earlier that year—his personal favorite moment on the album. The title itself was borrowed from the Velvet Underground's 1985 compilation VU, though the band briefly considered naming it The New Black after a small Rickenbacker amp that featured heavily in the recording chain.

A Genre-Bending Sound and Themes of Tainted Romance

Released on 6 September 2013 through Domino Recording Company, AM marked a deliberate sonic departure for the Sheffield quartet. Turner described the record as sounding 'like a Dr. Dre beat, but we've given it an Ike Turner bowl-cut and sent it galloping across the desert on a Stratocaster,' and the band openly cited Outkast, Aaliyah, Black Sabbath, Captain Beyond, and The Groundhogs as influences. The result blends psychedelic rock, blues rock, hard rock, heavy metal, desert rock, R&B, funk, soul, and—most notably for the band—hip-hop-inflected rhythms. Six singles carried the promotional cycle: 'R U Mine?', 'Do I Wanna Know?', 'Why'd You Only Call Me When You're High?', 'One for the Road', 'Arabella', and 'Snap Out of It'. Lyrically, the collection orbits frustration tied to compromised romance, desire, and isolation, giving the groovier, darker production an emotional edge that critics would later single out as the album's defining character.

Critical Acclaim and Enduring Legacy

From the moment AM reached shelves in autumn 2013, critics responded with enthusiasm, consistently highlighting the record's darker, funkier groove as a welcome evolution from the band's earlier work. The album claimed the Brit Award for British Album of the Year and earned nominations for both the Mercury Prize and the Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance (for the single 'Do I Wanna Know?'). Its standing has only grown with time: NME named it the best album of the 2010s and placed it on its '500 Greatest Albums of All Time' list, while Rolling Stone included it in the 2020 revision of its own '500 Greatest Albums of All Time' ranking. Multiple publications have also ranked AM among the finest releases of 2013 and of the entire decade. In 2023, the Recording Industry Association of America certified the album four-times platinum in the United States, a milestone that underscored how a record initially dismissed by some as a stylistic risk had instead become a touchstone for a generation of listeners and a permanent fixture in the band's catalogue.

Chart Dominance and Vinyl Revival

AM's commercial footprint was immediate and wide-reaching. It debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart—Arctic Monkeys' fifth consecutive top debut—and shifted over 157,000 copies in its opening week. The record also became one of the UK's best-selling vinyl albums of the 2010s, moving 73,000 units on that format alone. Beyond Britain, the album topped charts in several countries and cracked the top ten in many others. In the United States it became the band's most successful release to date, landing at number six on the Billboard 200 and simultaneously topping four additional Billboard charts. The single 'Do I Wanna Know?' made history as the group's first entry on the Billboard Hot 100. Together, these figures painted a picture of a British rock act breaking through into mainstream American consciousness while simultaneously riding the global vinyl resurgence, cementing AM not just as a critical darling but as a genuinely major commercial event across multiple markets and formats.