#was also part of the last band

[bosspigeon]

went to my first live metal show last night so here's a grimy venue bathroom selfie

shoutout to @madoimaru for the shirt!!!

[luck-of-the-drawings]

"I think this is the most inhuman; and human, that I've ever felt.." MUCH CAN HAPPEN IN A YEAR. IN FIVE YEARS. A DECADE. imagine how much can happen in a century. just ONE (1). How will you grow? what phases do you find? even in 5 years, you will find patterns.

[changewingwentz]

My First fanart offering 👋👋🙏

looking at manga covers with plots centered around fashion and their official arts on here due to severe art block and thought man I want iii to be put in there cuz I love his fit in the new era wooooo and it’s perfect to me but with a horror twist yknow

So I imagine him being in a cover of a visual novel or manga adaptation for funsies

Other additions below (without filter + texts!)

[kitkatsgalore]

you have my soul, you have my heart ♡

[nocturnal-birb]

x

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

kinds of WWII re-enactors

Man who's actually mainly into cars and has a jeep, or a truck of some kind, and decided to buy the costume to accompany it. This man also goes to a lot of car shows. This man re-enacts Americans, and is overweight. Closely related, man whose father fought in some war and inherited some military artifact like a rifle or an artillery piece. This man usually re-enacts Americans but sometimes Germans. This man is overweight.

Man who served in the military and desperately needs to be around people who will be impressed by that. This man often hates young men and always hates democrats. This man is in late middle age or old and often overweight. He is usually dressed as an officer.

Man whose favorite television show is Band of Brothers. This man re-enacts the 101st Airborne Division but not the 506th because that's too obvious. This many comes in many ages and shapes. Closely related, man who plays a lot of WWII video games. This man comes in many shapes and is in his 20s or 30s.

Man who is obsessed with guns or militaria more generally and needs to air out his collection a couple times a year. This man can be found in all uniforms. He is middle aged and overweight.

Man who desperately wants to be in the army or is currently in the military. This man is somewhere between 17 and 30 and is physically fit. This man re-enacts Germans. This man gets a little bit turned on when the lady tells Gerard Butler to come back with his shield or on it when he watches 300.

Woman who is a little past her prime but can pull off being sort of attractive in a niche way in 1940s clothes and makeup. This woman is middle aged, is a civilian or in the USO, and comes in many shapes.

Woman who is an influencer on Instagram who takes pinup photos. This woman can be found near the men who have vehicles, which is very exciting for them and very uncomfortable for her. But she wants that post engagement and is very good at pretending she didn't hear that comment. Closely related, woman who likes cosplay. This woman can be found anywhere and comes in many ages and shapes.

Woman who is following around the physically fit Germans. She re-enacts a nurse or some German auxiliary. This woman is physically attractive, and also gets a little bit turned on when the lady tells Gerard Butler to come back with his shield or on it when she watches 300.

Communists. These men and women look exactly how you think, talk exactly how you think, and re-enact exactly who you think.

[corvidcall]

unfortunately i am always grimly fascinated by dnis and bad callout posts. remember when someone wrote their scathing take down of john darnielle but their main allegation was that hes like. a really needy friend. or when there was all the twitter buzz about dan avidan being a groomer but when you read the original post the actual allegation was just that he slept with a fan and then ghosted her (which is, if you ask me, SIGNIFICANTLY less my business)

anyway none of these compare to my all time favorite spurious callout, which may have had genuinely objectionable stuff in it, but they put it in alphabetical order instead of order of severity, so the first allegation was: "ANTISEMITISM (person) is not Jewish but drew fanart of Jewish characters celebrating Hanukkah, which is cultural appropriation and tokenism and fetishizating Judaism"

i think about that one every goddamn day. why would you lead with that? didnt anyone ever teach you that, when making an argument, you should bring out the big guns FIRST? if this person was actually like. a sex pest or an abuser, shouldn't you START by saying that?? because otherwise youd run the risk of someone reading the first allegation you listed and going "OH okay so this is just petty squabbles about a guy you personally dislike, and not actually about a dangerous person that other people need to be warned about. i will disregard this entirely" (which for the record is exactly what happened???)

anyway theres no point to this post, other than, i guess, maybe consider taking a writing class before you start trying to make impassioned argumentative essays online so you don't waste as much of my time. YES i care very deeply about how you organize your arguments. YES it matters and YES i will ignore your argument if its badly structured. this is because im an exhausting person to be around. thank u

[feralnumberfive]

I get to see AJR tomorrow and ELO in September? Life is good 👍

[theageoftheunderstatement]

Alex Turner’s Interview with Rockin’ On Magazine, October Issue 2022

Written by Shino Kokawa

‘The Car’, a new album with an immersive, slow-burn pleasure that makes you lose track of time when you listen to it. I think it’s tremendously well thought out in terms of both detail and spatial design, but it’s an album aimed at a more organic sound compared to ‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino’, which was probably equally well thought out, wasn’t it?

Every single thing you just said, every single thing you just said is great. Thank you very much (laughs). So, first of all, I think this one is definitely influenced by the previous one. I think every piece of work that you did before it plays some kind of rehearsal role for the next one. I think it's absolutely true that this work is more organic than the last one. For example, there is self-expression in the lyrics, and the sound is music that comes straight from my inner self. The first song, which is the introduction to the album, started with a melody that suddenly came to me at one point, and it influenced the whole vibe of the album and everything I wrote later on. So you can hear something melancholy from this first track, and I think you can hear it throughout the whole album, here and there. But it's not like we decided, ‘Okay, this time we’re going to make something melancholy’. It just came out of me, organically, by accident, and you can hear it on the album. It’s an emotional thing that came naturally from within. With this album, we had time to really focus on the details, and we were able to explore dynamics that we’d never done before as a band, paying more attention to detail than ever before.

You described this album as a ‘return to Earth’ from the lunar world of the previous album.

(Laughs). Yes, it is. But to be honest, it’s not actually that simple, I think there are still lyrics on this album that have a sci-fi element to them, and I think there are parts that overlap with the last album. I think we’re trying to move away from that and get closer to Earth, but we haven’t completely come back to Earth yet. (Laughs).

Can you tell us about the starting point for this album, as fragmentary information had come up that Arctic Monkeys were starting to work on a new album around the summer of 2021?

The starting point is 2019, when we went to South America before the end of the tour for the last album, we wrote a song. That song was the starting point for the whole album. It just didn’t make it on this album. We were going to record it until the very end, and we were also going to make it the last song on the album, but we didn’t get into it in the end. However, you can hear the influence of that song from all the songs, and it’s like the song that ties everything together. That song is definitely the starting point for this album, and we’re definitely going to release it at some point.

What kind of song was it? The one with you playing the piano by yourself?

Yeah, yeah. There are a few songs on this album that I wrote on guitar. For example, ‘The Car’, and ‘Mr. Schwartz’. But basically I wrote them on piano. I wrote it by myself first, recorded a demo, then everyone listened to it, and then we got together in the studio and made the finished version.

There were photos online of you recording at Butley Priory, a Suffolk monastery, in the summer of 2021.

Yes, we worked alone for a while in 2020, and then we recorded in earnest as a band at that place last summer.

Did you have a definite theme or concept for the album at that point?

Yes, we did. I think we finally had a pretty clear idea of what the album was going to be about at that point. I don’t know, working with the band in Suffolk was like making a film. It was like shooting a film and then waiting for the editing process. With a film, depending on the editing process, the finished version can be completely different, but with this album, depending on the editing process, it could have gone in a completely different direction that I hadn’t anticipated. So when we all got together to record it, it was a process of just hammering into that sound that was in front of us, and then in the editing process, we would change the direction of the songs to the final finished form.

Was it a process with new musicians joining in and fleshing out the songs as you moved from one studio to another between Suffolk, London and Paris?

First we did it in Suffolk, then we went to La Frette outside Paris to record the vocals. And finally, we did the mixing in London. We also recorded the strings in London. This album was recorded one at a time, rather than all of us getting together and recording live. The whole thing was built up from the individual pieces that each of us created piece by piece. It was the most meticulous work I've ever done. In other words, it was a way of replacing what I had pre-recorded with each of us. What we wanted to do was get the whole band together at Butley Priory and use the energy that you feel in that place and the energy that comes from the band to gather the materials. The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin had recorded at that place, and I thought it was similar to what we were working on.

As a long-time fan of yours, I’m pleased to see that this album features a lot of terrifyingly cool guitars. What motivated you to turn to guitars again on this album?

There were things that happened that I didn’t expect, like the distorted guitar sound at the end of ‘Body Paint’, which I didn’t expect at all. But when we got together and played it, that kind of energy, I mean the energy of being with the band again, it just suddenly sounded like that. When we got together as a band, suddenly I wanted to stand up with my guitar in my hand, and I thought, I shouldn’t be sitting at the piano and hiding. So the guitar sound on the album came from the excitement of being with my bandmates again. When I got back in the band, I think it just kind of dawned on me that I wanted to show people my guitar. That happened when we were recording at Butley Priory. As I said before, the recording there was done in the first place with the aim of collecting things that came from the energy of the band being together. So for me, it was that guitar sound.

The arpeggio on ‘Mr. Schwartz’ is really beautiful.

As for the arpeggios, I don’t think I’ve ever played a guitar like that before. I did a bit of picking when I did the music for the film Submarine, but then I thought, it’s time for me to pluck the strings with my fingers on an Arctic Monkeys record. So the arpeggio was an idea that came from that. Actually, when we all started working on it in 2019, I already had the idea of making it a guitar album, and I thought it would be a good idea. But I just couldn’t get to a place where we could get the same guitar sound that we used to play. However, I think there are moments in this record where the guitars sound like what we used to play in the past. It’s not like it’s ringing all the time, but at certain moments it shines.

What kind of challenges did Arctic Monkeys set for themselves with this album, as a guitar band, as opposed to the guitars of the past?

What I thought was important here was the dynamics. I wanted the guitars to feel like they were moving around in the whole piece. There’s quite a lot of guitar usage on this album, but it’s much more subdued than ever before, and I also wanted to experiment with some effects on this album that I hadn’t really used in the past. For example, this time I brought out a wah pedal and blew the dust off it (laughs). The thought of having that kind of sound again itself was very exciting.

By the way, who were your guitar guru artists on this album?

‘Body Paint’ was definitely aimed at a Mick Ronson-esque guitar. I think that’s pretty obvious. And then, hmm, when it comes to influences, I'm thinking of other things (long pause), but, um, that’s about all I can think of right now. More influences were, as I said before, finding the effects again this time, and the wah-wah sound seemed to be very funny (laughs). That alone made me smile. I think those things had an effect.

On the other hand, the cinematic sound from the previous album is still present. From Scott Walker and Burt Bacharach-esque orchestral pop to Morricone and Nino Rota.

Yes.

Even something reminiscent of John Barry again. In your last album, you cited Dion’s Born To Be With You as an inspiration.

Yes. I was actually listening to that album again this morning. I’ve been listening to the film composers you just mentioned for a really long time, and I still enjoy listening to them so much that I think I’ve already absorbed so much of it that it’s almost become part of my DNA to the point where I can’t really draw a line as an objective influence. So when I write songs, I think it comes out naturally. But the difference is that in the end, what we do is just pop music. So in other words, it’s completed through that filter. The composers that you just mentioned don’t make pop music, and that’s what makes me think they are very different.

What is exciting about this album is that the ‘layers’ created by the minimal band sound and the ‘layers’ created by the extravagant orchestra are suddenly swapped up and down, and their strengths and weaknesses are reversed at the drop of a hat. These two layers are reminiscent of the relationship between dialogue and voice-over in film, for example.

I like the idea of voice-overs, I’ll use that next time when I'm a journalist (laughs). Yeah, but what you just said was definitely the intention and I thought it was the only way the album could work. So when a wave comes, we embrace it, and like a wave, each part comes and goes, each part has its place. I wasn’t interested in the typical rock band with strings (laughs). In a way, I think that's even a little bit unrealistic. But I thought the idea of a “rock band” appearing and disappearing was possible. That’s why I sometimes look at rock bands from a bird’s eye view. I think this album is only possible with that kind of agreement, and it actually took me a long time to figure out how to make it work. In other words, at the mixing stage, depending on the ...... time, I tried not to show myself. Sometimes I pulled myself back, sometimes I turned myself off, sometimes I let go and tried not to hold on to what I was thinking or what ideas I had when I was recording. If you hold on to what you were thinking at the time, you might think that you absolutely have to keep this part. In other words, this time, I decided that if I thought something didn't fit into the overall picture, I would delete it, no matter what thoughts were put into it, and I think I was able to do that well. Not only the rock band elements, but also the string section, we recorded something so epic that normally I would have wanted to leave it as it was, but I deleted everything that I didn’t think would fit. So the most important thing about this album was that the overall balance was paramount above all else.

Earlier, you mentioned that there are still sci-fi elements in the lyrics. Nevertheless, the lyrics of this album have come down to earth. For example, “Lunching with an English tourist” and “Opening a mini champagne bottle” described a holiday at a seaside resort somewhere, or scenes from a journey.

“The Car” is certainly like that. And “I Ain't Quite Where I Think I Am” has an island in it. So I think you could say that there’s a European feel to it, but what I'm trying to say there is that I know where I am. I know where I am. And I think that's what you see in a lot of parts on this album. I think one of the things that the lyrics on this album talk about is the passage of a tremendous amount of time. And that leads to a feeling of “So where am I now?”, which led to the description of places. I just performed at Reading Festival a few weeks ago, and it reminded me of the first time I performed in Reading. I think I was 19 or 20 or something. I felt really nostalgic and I was extremely excited when I actually got on stage. And when I did the maths, it had been 17 years since the moment I first performed. It was very hard to accept that fact. I thought, “No way, that can't be true, that can't be true” (laughs). Yeah, I think the lyrics on this album express that feeling in some ways.

Does it mean melancholy about the past? Or is it about looking at it objectively?

There may be lyrics about the past, but the music doesn’t look back. The music as a whole feels like it’s about moving forward. So it’s a contradictory relationship, and it’s kind of balanced in that way.

Nevertheless, the vocal excellence of this album is impressive. You said in the press release that you “channeled the expression of emotions so deep that sometimes the words almost seem to get in the way” - does that mean that the lyrical content of this album is not that relevant to the vocalisation?

Oh ...... it’s ...... (long pause), I think it all has to work together to become something that strikes a chord with ...... people. It’s not just the vocals, it’s the song. Not just the vocals, but the song, the melody, the chords, the lyrics. Singers often talk about how their voice comes from their soul, from their instincts. In other words, you don’t sing from your head, you want to sing from here (pointing to the belly). But actually, it’s sometimes difficult to reach my instinctive voice. ...... I used to remember Leon Russell’s wonderful song “A Song for You”, where he sings, “If my words don’t come together / Listen to the melody / Cause my love is in there hiding.” That's the lyric I thought about. That alone is a very clever expression (laughs), and it sums up all I wanted to say. I mean, what I’m trying to express here is in something that goes beyond words.

How do you think your vocals on this album were able to embody such deep emotion, even beyond words?

I just have to trust my instincts. And maybe accepting how I’m feeling in this moment. I tried to connect to that. I think that’s something that gradually increases over time, and then, physically, growing up [laughs]. I’ve been thinking about that over time. In fact, compared to when I was 18, my voice is definitely a bit lower. I really feel that now. I didn’t realize that my voice had changed over time, but now when I get on stage and try to sing my first songs or my old songs, I feel like my voice back then was so high that I would really get out of breath (laughs).

What is the album title ‘The Car’ a metaphor for? I heard that it was inspired by a photograph that Matt Helders took. When I saw that picture, I had the feeling that something was about to start, like the first scene in the film.

Yeah, that's exactly right. When I saw that photo, I was really excited too. It was taken by Matt, our drummer, and it was taken long before the new songs were written, and as soon as I saw it, I thought, ‘Something's about to start’ (laughs). Then I also thought that the photo definitely had to be named as ‘The Car’. That was the beginning of everything. Of course, I wanted to shorten the title of this album after the previous one (laughs). So it was perfect. But I just thought it would be nice because the title doesn’t symbolize anything about the whole record, it's not really connected to it, it’s rather uncluttered.

Arctic Monkeys celebrates their 20th anniversary this year. What do you think, is the 20-year history of Arctic Monkeys something that is a natural projection of your lives?

No, seriously, it’s really been 20 years since we all got together in the summer of 2002 in a garage and met everybody. So I think there’s definitely a sense of looking back on that somewhere on the album, but it’s not directly about ‘we’ve been together 20 years now’ (laughs), but there are some musical elements where we kind of come to terms with that.

Is the last 20 years a personal story of the four of you growing up? Or did you feel like you were running a huge project called Arctic Monkeys?

Probably a bit of both, I suppose. Yeah, but it's interesting. I know what you mean. The relationship between the four of us is something that goes back to our childhood, before the band started, before the name Arctic Monkeys, before the concept of a band. Our growth story is definitely part of the band’s growth story, but at a certain point we had to separate the two. At some point, I had to separate the concept of the band “Arctic Monkeys” and the relationship between me and my friends. By the time we get here, we’re already a family, so it’s not just Arctic Monkeys. I may not have explained it well.

The band has a series of upcoming tours, but the Japanese fans have been waiting for the show in Japan for a long time!

I definitely want to go, because I feel like I haven’t been to Japan for a very long time. When was the last time I went there? I can’t even remember. But I definitely want to go this time. I'm planning for that now.

[captain-crowfish]

Ok I have to shit this out of my brain before I forget

Laika's Missing Link and Aardman's The Pirates (exclamation mark) band of misfits/an adventure with scientists would make for a pretty banger crossover. Please ask me to elaborate, because I will. I will get so lost in thought on entertaining the idea so please, please egg me on. If you've seen the latter movie just please, please think about it. See my vision. Join me. Then again.

[somethingsomethingcomic]

deadnamed at my father's funeral

[hotarufutaba]

my new band guys aphrodisica :3 they play in a club that is similar to a host club

[giftedpoison]

thinking about how the other day I felt happiness for the first time in a long time (like happiness about where I am at in life and joy for my future plans. Like I was working 8-4:30 and I was thinking about how I was going to do a few ubereats runs until 6ish after and then come home and get to write and crack open my kung fu binder again that I've been working with to prove to myself I'm ready to go back)

usually I just feel content at like a 5 sometimes if I go to a concert or whatever it can get up to 6,7,8. but that's it

and I have that persistent depression disorder. that i never remember how to spell.

So you can imagine my surprise when i genuinely just felt happy and at peace? And i had mania by fob album stuck in my head. life was good.

I then got sucker punched by my physical health symptoms that were really bad and almost collapsed and could not hold myself up so I was leaning on a cart not moving when it hit 4:30. And did not do anything that I planned to after work because of it.

BUT

the key is i felt happiness for the first time in forever.

[justanotherfanartist]

.

[lexalovesbooks]

Chinese professor really went ‘eh, if they cheat I don’t care’ and went back to her office leaving us completely alone to take our final exam