“Four Out of Five”

About halfway through Arctic Monkeys’ new album, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, Alex Turner invites you to his taqueria on the moon. And it’s not just any taqueria on the moon: It’s a rooftop taqueria, and it’s getting rave reviews. “Four stars out of five,” he promises, his voice seething. “And that’s unheard of,” he adds.

It’s a hilarious and jarring interjection: the self-aggrandizing narcissist anticipating a big reaction, now tasked with filling up the silence. The new record is full of moments like this—mocking and self-aware, sung in a grizzly, demonic croon that’s vaguely unstable, like he’s either about to break into tears or hysterical laughter. While the resulting album perplexes far more than we’ve come to expect from one of the world’s biggest rock bands, on highlights like “Four Out of Five,” the risks build to something extraordinary.

Urging fans to approach Tranquility Base as a complete work, Arctic Monkeys chose not to issue any pre-release singles, which places “Four Out of Five” in a peculiar spot as both its most immediate song and one of its oddest. The band’s sleazy groove falls somewhere between King Crimson doing the blues, Jim O’Rourke channeling yacht rock, and Billy Joel going new wave, and it’s somehow perfect, stomping with an eerie, psychedelic whimsy that seems to come naturally.

And if Turner’s lyrics touch on war, natural disaster, space colonization, and gentrification (“Cute new places keep on popping up,” he observes), his talking points aren’t really the message. Instead, “Four Out of Five” is an escape, an invitation to forget everything you know about this wildly popular band and take them on their own terms. When you meet them there, you’ll hear a rock reinvention, six albums in, composed of neither faux irony nor scatterbrained bitterness but instead, a striking, recharged imagination. It makes the future—as bleak as it may be—seem a lot more fun. And that’s unheard of.