Arctic Monkeys planning ‘heavier’ fifth album

Arctic Monkeys have spoken about their plans for the follow-up to Suck It And See and have said they want to make a “heavier’ new album.

The Sheffield band, who have just completed their world tour in support of their fourth studio album, told Artrocker that they’re making plans for its follow-up and are hoping to keep writing tracks in the vein of recent single “R U Mine”.

Asked about their future plans, frontman Alex Turner said: “I think we’re going to go the direction of those heavier tunes. We did ‘R U Mine’, and I think that’s where it’s going to be at for us for the next record.”

Turner then said that the band felt the strongest moments of Suck It And See were the heavier bits, adding: “We feel the strength of the last record is ‘Don’t Sit Down…‘, the other songs like that – ‘Brick By Brick’ – the other side of it is fine, but I don’t know how much more of that we can do.”

Turner added that he hoped the band would record an album in their home city of Sheffield soon and that he would be glad to write in the band’s rehearsal space, rather than on acoustic guitar apart from his bandmates. He said:

“It would be nice to record in Sheffield, which we haven’t done for a while. I was living in New York, and that’s where I wrote a lot of those songs, and the fact that me and the other chaps were on either side of a large body of water – I wrote a lot on acoustic guitar in the flat. Then we went and applied to it what we thought they needed, which is not really a way that we worked before.”

He continued: “Mostly it’s the just the four of us hashing it out in a rehearsal space, but those kind of songs were in the minority on the last record due to circumstance really.”