I'm just a musical prostitute, my dear

By Andrew Trendell, 12th November 2021

Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders has revealed that the band’s new album is “pretty much” finished and likely to arrive in 2022 ahead of a summer tour.

Fans have been eager for news on the anticipated follow-up to 2018’s acclaimed ‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino‘, with numerous reports and rumours around its recording emerging over the last year.

Back in January, the Sheffield band’s manager revealed that the group had been “working on music” and had initially planned to record last summer, before Helders confirmed that they were in the “early stages” of the album while trying to overcome obstacles brought on by the pandemic. Then, back in August, it emerged that the band had been recording new material in Suffolk.

Now, as part of the BBC’s Drumathon, Helders joined 5 Live Breakfast this morning to give a drum lesson and talk to presenter Rick Edwards.

Asked if the new album was “ready to go”, Helders replied: “Yeah, pretty much, yeah. It was a bit disjointed how we had to do it, and there are bits to finish off, but yeah, it’s all in the works.”

He went to say that he believed the album would be out in 2022, adding: “I think by the time we get everything together it’ll be next year. Hopefully we can get out and tour next summer.”

The drummer also went on to tease the potential sound of the record.

“We tend to always move it on a little bit,” he said. “For us, because we’re so involved in it, it always makes sense. They always kind of pick up where the other one left off in a way. It makes sense when you think about it in the context of the last record. But we always do try and do something a bit different – it’s kind of hard to describe. You can tell it’s the same band.”

Edwards then asked the sticksman if he was “confident you’ll bring the fans with you when you know that you’re evolving the sound,” to which he replied: “No, and I think we got a bit of a wake-up call with that on the third album [‘Humbug’, 2009]. That was more of an intentional decision to do something different. That was one where we’d get weird back-handed compliments from the fans who stuck around for that one.

“They’d be like, ‘Oh, I actually like Humbug!’ Why? Did some people not?”

Why is Matt playing guitar?

Why is Alex smoking while drumming?

He contributed a line in the second verse of ‘American Sports’ that goes: “The trainer’s explanation was accepted by the steward.” Alex explains:

“I was over at his house one day, struggling to get off the mark and he announced ‘sometimes, I think of these phrases here and there that you might be able to do something with’. I was like, ‘Yeah, go for it Granddad. I’ll take all the help I can get at this point.’"

“He’s very keen on horseracing and at the racing, when there’s a steward’s enquiry – [when] there’s some discrepancy or something untoward in the race - and he said, ‘All you ever get to hear after this enquiry is: the trainer’s explanation was accepted by the steward.’ And he said it to me, I was like ‘that’s so loaded!’ Wrote it down for me, took it away and wrote the rest of the verse around it.”

“Through the two years of making the record I went through a lot of personal changes — I just had the conversations with myself that you don’t always have. And I just feel more comfortable being myself. The overall arc is just that I tried to redefine what success means to me. If you don’t hit the top of the chart, your life doesn’t change. If that was what I was aiming at, and then it didn’t happen, then I’d feel so much worse. I tried to rewire what I thought about it. I feel so much freer, making this album — you get to a place where you feel happy even if the song is about the time when you weren’t that happy.”

Fine Line has now spent a full year on the Billboard 200. It spawned Harry’s first Hot 100 #1 hit “Watermelon Sugar”. It was the last No.1 album of the decade & first No.1 album of the decade. It’s the 4th Album on Billboard 200′s Year End list & Spotify’s 4th most streamed album globally in 2020.

This years iHeartRadio Jingle Ball is exclusively online. Coverage begins at 9 PM EST/6PM PST/2 AM GMT. Here are some ways you can watch or listen!

Watch:

CW App - only available to US Residents

iHeart Radio YouTube (Canadian Residents Only)

iHeart Radio Mexico YouTube (Mexico Residents Only)

If you live outside these countries but have a VPN, you can try to use the links above!

Listen:

You can also listen to the show via 95 stations on the iHeart Radio app

If you don’t have a VPN:

These are definitely not streams to the CW. (make sure you have a good virus program and adblocker available!)  link 1 | link 2 | link 3