Speaking to WAtoday from LA – but retaining that distinctive regional accent of his native Sheffield – Helders says tours following the album’s release in May last year helped iron out some of the early hiccups ahead of their Australian outing. “It’s at a good place now where we’ve worked out the set, so everything’s well balanced and we sort of interchange some of the new ones depending on how we feel that night,” he says. “Part of that was bringing it to life; we had to sort of set the scene in a way.” But Helders admits it was a “daunting” process at first. “Some of it didn’t work [in concert] — starting with a ballad didn’t work,” he said.

“It’s just a matter of figuring it out basically, and what of the older songs we could play that sort of make more sense with this new stuff.” Frontman Alex Turner started writing Tranquility Base on his own, sat in front of a piano, piecing together an album which leads the listener on a hotel-lounge sci-fi pop trip, taking aim at topics like consumerism and the mire of modern life. For the rest of the band, Helders says, it was a matter of “finding your role within that world that [Turner had] created”. “It’s never the same for us, the writing process sometimes changes,” Helders says.

“We sort of make a conscious effort to make a bit of a departure from what we did last time, bearing in mind it all has to make sense somehow.” The album came on the back of a well-published hiatus beginning in 2014, after the release of AM and more than a year touring the album. Instead of keeping the momentum up the band took time off to focus on other interests, including production duties and side-projects. Helders for one seems relieved to be both back in the studio and back on the road as Arctic Monkeys. “I can speak for myself where I think that I’m not in a rush to have another break as long as we did just then,” he says.

“We all kind of did our own thing – it was much needed at the time, to be honest – but now I think we’re all sort of enjoying being in Arctic Monkeys and we had such a good time making that last record and we had a lot of fun in the studio.” Loading Perhaps unsurprisingly, the opening lines from Tranquility Base – Turner’s croon that “I just wanted to be one of The Strokes” on Star Treatment – were jumped on and have been the subject of plenty of dissection as critics and reviewers took in the new album. But the Arctic Monkeys have come a long way from those 20-somethings who sang about looking good on the dancefloor back in 2006; they’ve flexed their skills and, Helders says, are more comfortable in the studio – “as we’ve got better at it, it’s sort of a nice place to be for us”. And while Turner might never be in The Strokes, he and his bandmates are nevertheless beginning to occupy the same space as their early idols have.