Today’s the day the doors open on Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, the Arctic Monkeys' first new album in five years and arguably their most surprising work to date.

To help unpack the record, triple j's Linda Marigliano had a secret sit-down with frontman Alex Turner earlier this year to discuss where his head was at for album #6, the significant role of the piano, the cinematic references, shift in lyrics and sound, down to constructing the model that features on the cover.

Listen to our full interview below, in the 2018 podcast, and read on for some insights from the Arctic Monkeys ringleader.

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Yes, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is a complete 180 from AM

The band previously declared TBHC as “definitely not a guitar-heavy record”, and on first listen there’s a distinct lack of the big riffs, festival-sized hooks, and loping tempos – the very things that made AM such a success and Arctic Monkeys the leather jacket-sporting saviours of rock.

“I honestly don’t know how we would’ve done something like AM again. Thinking about it, I don’t know we would’ve done anything other than this,” says Turner, who had no intention of repeating himself.

Recorded between studios in L.A., Paris, and London, TBHC is luxurious, wading into slower tempos and woozy atmospheres on what are easily the band’s most complicated, compelling textures and arrangements to date.

The closest sonic cousin would be 2009’s Humbug, if you dusted off its desert rock leanings, or the nostalgic, lounge shading of The Last Shadow Puppets. There's rubbery slaps of organ and twangy guitar, velvety strings, few drums - all relishing in a ghoulish glamour and smoky ambiance.

“Jamie [Cook, guitarist] came and we worked on stuff together for a couple of weeks. It was during that time that I was encouraged I was barking up the right tree. It did seem different to what we’ve done before but his enthusiasm for it that was like ‘well, lets’ go this way then’.”

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So long, love songs

Most Arctic Monkeys songs, and certainly a lot of AM, are about relationships with the opposite sex. TBHC undermines that dynamic with confident ambiguity.

Turner says these are his most personal songs yet but potentially, they’re his least relatable, subbing out the familiar conversational tone for a cryptic one.

This is not the scrappy 19-year-old trying to pick up girls in nightclubs on Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not but a wisened, world famous 32-year-old writing in self-imposed seclusion, etching thoughts about himself in deeply coded wordplay and a tone that drifts between autobiographical and fictional.

“Some lines in it are totally me having a word with myself, more so I think than before. I think it was a friend of mine said to me ‘You’ve done the love songs – I’d love to hear you do something that’s not that’. The type of lyrics on AM, what that’s all about, there’s no more ways I could say that anymore. I think that’s what my friend was getting at."

Turner says when he attempted to approach broader subject matter in the past, "the poetry just wasn’t there for me... I didn’t know how to write about that."

“This time I think I managed to find it. The battle between the future and the past, just there innit? It’s all there."

His imagination fed by obscure soundtracks, European torch singers, Italian pop, chanson, and vintage sci-fi (basically anything other than rock bands), Turner's dramatic reinvention conjures up visions of the band as a cocktail bar act in a decadent hotel... that just so happens to be on the moon.

The album is a musical world listeners can escape to

Tranquility Base is the real-world name for the exact site of the 1969 moon landing. The ‘Hotel & Casino’ part? That’s Alex Turner’s invention.

“I liked the idea that the record would have the name of a place because records and songs that I love, when you really fall in love with it, it does seem like a place you go. You can keep going back there and sometimes, you move in for a while.”

If the record sounds like something cooked up by a lounge lizare-turned-batty hermit, it's because it kinda was - Turner began work alone, composing demos locked up in the basement of his Hollywood Hills home.

“This zone became known as the lunar surface amongst friends,” an in-joke based on "conspiracy theories about Stanley Kubrick faking the moon landing."

"I was going in this room on my own and working with these machines and this music. I think just this idea of ‘what’s going on in there?’, and faking a lunar landing, sort of became synonymous with what we were doing in there."

There’s a LOT of film and sci-fi references

Turner clearly had cinema on the brain writing this album, which Genius.com is going to have a field day with.

'What do you mean you've never seen Blade Runner?,' a lyric quizzes in the opener 'Star Treatment', which also mentions "warp speed chic", all in a song that Turner likens is about songwriting the way Fellini's meta-classic 8½ is to filmmaking.

"It’s the first song I wrote for the record," Turner says. "It starts off as a song about songwriting. I think the reason for that is I didn’t have any ideas..."

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There's other references to camera techniques (‘One Point Perspective’), opening credits, South Korean director Chan-wook Park’s Vengeance Trilogy, and Batman (‘Batphone’), and the band even shot a music video for ‘Four Out of Five’ (which namechecks the Clavius lunar crater) on the former location of Stanley Kubrick’s historical epic Barry Lyndon. Then there’s the track ‘Science Fiction’, with the Terminator 3-nodding line about “the rise of the machines”.

“I wrote [that song] shortly after watching Fassbinder’s World On A Wire, which there’s a shout-out to in the bridge,” Turner says, referencing a cult ‘70s German mini-series.

No wonder the band programmed a mini-film festival at a Sydney pop-up store event.

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The piano plays a significant role on the album, essentially helping Turner overcome writer’s block

The leering, cabaret-worthy ivories are a distinguishing feature of the album, and turns out: “The piano was a gift from my manager Ian [McAndrew] for me 30th birthday. That became the centrepiece in the studio and I pretty much played it every day since it showed up there."

"I don't know what I would have done without it, really. I had no ideas and through that, suddenly started to have ideas. I just knew everything I was about to do when I picked up a guitar. So, you change that… [The piano] brought out this character. It just made me think in a totally different way. I think the lyrics I came up with were different as a result of the chords me fingers had fallen on."

TBHC's balmy, beguiling sound harkens to the past but its self-reflexive, stream-of-consciousness lyrics are preoccupied with a future dominated by technology and consumer culture.

"My virtual reality mask is stuck on 'Parliament Brawl'," Turner sings on 'American Sports'; He croons about the moon's surface becoming gentrified on 'Four Out Of Five' and the toxicity of social media on 'She Looks Like Fun'.

He's lamenting a future that was imagined by the late '60s, with dreams of heading skyward to outer space, but the reality now seemingly earthbound and fixated on what it's in our hands and newsfeeds.

Like all good sci-fi, he's creating another world in order to comment on this one. Music rooted in a bit of scientific reality, but happy to toy with fiction.

Alex’s Grandad has a songwriting credit

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.”

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Turner spent months designing and building the model on the album cover

Upon hearing the music, the band’s UK management suggested a photo of the band on the cover wouldn’t cut it. "That stayed with me," says Turner, who returned to Los Angeles and “started becoming quite obsessed with this idea of making the artwork."

"I quickly got to this place where I thought, ‘if that’s the name of the record, an architectural model – that seems like that should be what’s on the cover’. I eventually just got a lot of cardboard and a knife and started hacking it up. To begin with… It was as simple as it’s the sixth record, so I drew a six-sided shape and… made a right mess from there.”

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"Couple of months I was at it. It was funny, having this serious conversation about this cardboard [thing]," he admits. "It was a strange time."

“I remember when I finished that I was like, ‘oh we probably don’t even need to tell anybody that was me. But cut to me now: just spilling the beans.”