Question

An article about bands?​

Answer 1

Arctic Monkeys may have ‘saved rock’n’roll’ but can they save the album?

By eschewing pre-release whistles and bells with their new album, the band are boldly going back to basics

It might just be the most skin-crawling moment in recent music history. To watch it back now is to have every greasy pub band in Camden inside you at the same time. It is, of course, when Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner got up at the 2014 Brits and tried to make a Braveheart speech defending guitar music. “That rock’n’roll, it just won’t go away,” he cooed like he’d just been elected president of white guys. “It might hibernate from time to time, sink back into the swamp … but it’s always waiting there, just around the corner, ready to make its way back through the sludge.”

Turner later tried to brush the speech aside as a joke (by that point NME had already put him on the cover mocked up as Uncle Sam with the line “rock’n’roll needs you”). Once the histrionics were over, though, it wasn’t necessarily rock’n’roll that wouldn’t go away, but the success of the Monkeys. That award was four years ago, but their last album AM has sold more than 1m copies in the UK, almost unheard-of in the streaming era, especially for an indie band. HMV says it sold more vinyl copies of AM last year than any year since its release.