The record depicts a series of vignettes set at the eponymous deserted lunar hotel from the perspectives of its ragtag menagerie of employees.
If you strip away the dreamy guitars, retro-futuristic sound and lounge singer shimmer, the Arctic Monkeys’ divisive sixth album is sonically distant, nostalgic and generally anxious. It’s surely impossible not to see, right now, that 2018’s ‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino’ is the perfect encapsulation of 2020 an album borne out of isolation now hits even harder than before.
When Alex Turner hunkered down, isolated, in the spare bedroom of his Los Angeles home in front of a Steinway Vertegrand piano in 2016, it’s highly unlikely he knew that the end product would only become more profound two years down the line as the world copes with a global pandemic.
