The band’s seventh studio album The Car is a return to the sound introduced on Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino, their 2018 album. If you listened to “Star Treatment” off that project and loved it, you’re getting that expanded to a lush, rock-tinged, lounge experience.Thematically, this project goes everywhere. It’s often a meta commentary on show business and fan expectation, and other times it delves into espionage and star-crossed love ballads. All of this being done in Turner’s tenor makes for a familiar yet uniquely odd listening experience. Turner does struggle to make his voice work in the context of lounge pop and simultaneously doesn’t have the tongue-in-cheek inflection that Tranquility Base was littered with. But it’s easy to look past this, and his voice works for the most part.The opening track “There’d Better Be A Mirrorball” mirrors “Star Treatment” heavily, the latter also being the opener for its respective album. The band puts on the glitz of 60s lounge as Alex Turner croons over a reluctant one night stand.
Another stand-out is “Sculptures of Anything Goes”, a somewhat bitter and brooding track about the band evolving their sound and the backlash against it. It’s a heartfelt admission to their fans that they might never make the music that made them beloved, because they just aren’t the same people anymore. The single “Body Paint” was a bit too subtle to work on its own, but in the context of the album it works as a biting tale of infidelity.
While the album is solid listen, there’s not much depth to it. You listen to it once, read the lyrics once, and you’ve pulled out everything of substance you’re gonna get from it. It oddly enough feels like a novelty, like a collection of instrumental leftovers from the Tranquility Base sessions. This doesn’t make the project lazy or creatively bankrupt, in fact it’s the first album of theirs in nearly a decade that I’ve loved. All it means is that, there’s not much to it past what you immediately see. Your mileage with The Car wholly depends on one thing: do you like Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino. If your answer to this is “Yes I do”, then The Car is an earnest 37-minute ride exploring this sound. However, this project lacks the Arctic Monkeys flavor that defined albums like Favorite Worst Nightmare, Humbug, and even AM.