Every Arctic Monkeys Album Ranked

It’s one of the band’s most elegant tricks to date, setting this politically-charged, technology conscious album on the moon. By using the sci-fi trope of alien technology or surroundings passing comment on the human experience, Tranquility Base has enough distance from its subject to avoid being trite. It also allows the irony, satire and humour to thrive. “I’m a big name in deep space, ask your mates,” Turner quips on opener Star Treatment, a jazzy lounge-tune that chronicles the ups and downs of Turner’s lunar persona, a seemingly washed-up rockstar who’s taken residency at the Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino, permanently soused on martinis as he performs “two shows a day, four nights a week.”

One Point Perspective is pitch-perfect in its nostalgia-drenched instrumentation; you can smell the baking tarmac as Turner reads the riot act on an apocalypse that’s only just being prioritised, presumably back on earth. People "sing-song round the money tree" and cry some of the "hottest tears" they’ve ever cried in this delirious portrait of a planet ravaged by human folly. Lead single Four Out Of Five deftly pokes fun at how modern advertising sells us a lifestyle rather than a product, and perhaps this is why we as consumers are never satisfied past a "four stars out of five" rating, and even that’s "unheard of".

Tranquility Base proves to be a rational response to the madness of the moment. You get the feeling there’s a timeline where Trump isn’t president, global warming was taken seriously and Arctic Monkeys never made this album. It's the first time they've let go and created something escapist rather than firmly rooted on terra firma, taking that one small step into fully-fledged art-rock. If you ask me, it's one silver-lining to living in the twilight zone.