Arctic Monkeys’ AM sold us an aspirational dark fantasy of adulthood

Arctic Monkeys have lived many lives. Over the course of their two-decade career, the Sheffield rockers have morphed from a quartet of Julian Casablancas knock-offs to leather-clad rock and roll saviours, and now, a jazz lounge band paying tribute to the past.

Yet it’s their fifth album, 2013’s AM, that remains their most beloved. It is, to date, one of their most commercially successful and critically acclaimed, winning two BRIT Awards, 6 NME Awards and a Grammy nomination. The album turns 10 years old in September but it’s still as popular as ever. In August 2023, one of AM’s most beloved tracks “I Wanna Be Yours” sat at number 27 on the Spotify Global Top 50. AM was in the top 15 highest-selling vinyl records in the UK this year so far.

It remains one of the most revered rock albums of the century, but its legacy is apparent in more than just the response from critics and industry bodies who showered AM with praise and accolades. It’s become a mainstay of Tumblr’s soft grunge scene and an icon of millennial youth culture in the process.

To an outsider, AM’s past and present status as a youth culture phenomenon may seem unlikely. While often lumped into the same category, other acts of the Tumblr era — The 1975, Lorde, Lana Del Rey, Sky Ferreira, The Neighbourhood—were shiny, new performers who sang about their teenage or young adult experiences. Arctic Monkeys, however, had been performing together for 11 years at this point, and were most of the way through shedding their bookish mop-topped lad image for that of serious adult musicians. AM captivated millions of us not despite, but because of, its perceived adultness.

The album presented an aspirational teenage fantasy of what adulthood would look like: dark and lustful, countless late nights bookended by turbulent relationships, soundtracked by gramophones, and scented by cigarette smoke. Its heavy guitar riffs, slinky vocals, and forlorn lyrics sounded like nightcrawling in a nameless city. It was the perfect soundtrack both to the soft grunge movement that had been brewing on Tumblr, and to sauntering down the street feeling cooler than you actually are.

Literature on the origins of the movement is scarce, but soft grunge was a digital manifestation of the 90s nostalgia, adopted by teenagers drawn to dark, cold aesthetics that thinly veiled thick layers of emotion. In its most simple form, soft grunge perhaps one of the earliest examples of an internet “aesthetic”, immortalised by the countless black-and-white or VSCO P5-filtered photos of black boots, fishnet tights, BLK water, cigarettes and tennis skirts that circulated on the website. But soft grunge content also often evoked certain feelings or narratives: unrequited love, teenage sadness, and a kind of yearning to look a certain way, live in a certain city or kiss a certain person. On Tumblr, a platform that runs on the power of beautiful words and images, content that simultaneously expressed a sense of yearning and made it look good rose to the top.

In June 2013, Arctic Monkeys released the first single from AM, “Do I Wanna Know?” with an accompanying fully animated video. It featured a simple white line atop a black background, moving in the shape of a soundwave, before blasting into colour and the shapes of women’s bodies. Screenshots and GIFs of the video quickly circulated on soft grunge Tumblr, often superimposed with its lyrics. Snippets of the song’s confessional lyrics, like “I dreamt about you nearly every night this week” and “The nights were mainly made for saying things that you can’t say tomorrow day,” seemed made for the platform. The song was filled with beautifully crafted sentences that, when cut off from the song itself and pasted onto a grayscale image in italicised Helvetica, still read like gut-punches of emotion.

On Tumblr, a platform built on a bedrock of art, literature and fandom, AM was inevitably elevated to superstar status. In February 2014, Tumblr’s Head of Music Strategy and Outreach Nate Auerbach revealed that in a 30-day period earlier that year, there were 57,000 posts tagged “Arctic Monkeys,” making the band “bigger than Lady Gaga”. Whether that was true or overblown, AM certainly captured the most cutting emotions a teenager could feel and hid them beneath a hard shell, making it just the right soundtrack to yearn, romanticise and emote to.

And then there was Alex Turner. Now fashioning himself into Danny Zuko by way of Hedi Slimane, he was a mysterious, bad-boy rockstar who told you exactly what how he felt, shielded by his black leather jacket, dark aviators and a gelled quiff. His expressions of desire made him the object of even more desire. The antithesis to say, One Direction, who enjoyed a concurrent massive fanbase on Tumblr, Alex’s second-person love songs nonetheless inspired a similar sort of obsessive fanfiction-writing, GIF-making fandom as those other five British heartthrobs. And as with 1D, the thirst has transcended time itself: Tumblr may have died off, but clips of Alex Turner crooning and gyrating onstage during the AM era still garner countless thirst comments on TikTok.

The Tumblr posts and thirst edits don’t obscure the fact that AM simply sounded amazing. Although inspired by mid-century rock and blues, it was somehow completely fresh. Listening to the album in full felt like charting through a romance in a man’s life, beginning with excitement and curiosity and ending with the naked desire to be loved. The most popular song from AM today remains “I Wanna Be Yours”, the album’s final track, which was not chosen as one of the album’s six singles. The song, in both its original form and sped-up versions, circulates on TikTok in posts that also showcase its lyrics visually — lyrics originally written by John Cooper Clarke in 1982, as a love poem.

Its relatively simple lyrics, the only ones on the album not written by Turner, have the timelessness and accessibility of a 40-year-old poem, precisely because it is one. “‘I Wanna Be Yours’ is perhaps so loved because it’s the polar opposite of playing hard to get,” Ben Beaumont-Thomas wrote in The Guardian. In Arctic Monkeys’ version, Turner’s drowsy drone bleeds into desperation—a suitably soft grunge emotion.

Most of the band’s press appearances and performances from the AM era maintained an inviolable facade. Perhaps the most memorable tidbit was Alex’s acceptance speech for the British Album of the Year Award at the 2014 BRITs. Swaggering onto the stage, he mused: “That rock’n’roll, eh? That rock’n’roll, it just won’t go away. It might hibernate from time to time and sink back into the swamp. I think the cyclical nature of the universe in which it exists demands it adheres to some of its rules. But it’s always waiting there, just around the corner, ready to make its way back through the sludge and smash through the glass ceiling, looking better than ever.”

With older, more cynical eyes, one can see that Alex was committing to the bit a little too hard. But at the time, his statement sounded like a declaration that rock and roll is here to stay. While other Tumblrified albums — The 1975’s self-titled debut, Lana Del Rey’s Born To Die, and Lorde’s Pure Heroine — announced the arrival of new blood, looking back at AM feels like pinpointing the last breath of rock and roll monoculture before an increasingly genre-less world.

The revival in the past year of indie sleaze and 00s, Tumblrified aesthetics has only added to the resurgence of AM nostalgia, to former teenagers reminiscing about simpler times of scrolling on the internet in their bedrooms. But the feelings AM inspires, 10 years later, are not just longing for the past. Instead, like the first time around, the yearning is still directed toward the future.

The power of AM is that it describes a world of experiences that don’t quite exist. The real world is nothing like what the Monkeys promised us. Nights out are often disappointing, punctuated by the decidedly clumsy inconveniences of texting your friends “wya?” and checking Uber prices as the night goes on. Romances and liaisons come with “icks”, situationships and splitting the bill. Nobody is as cool as Alex Turner or as magnetic as the women he sang about.

“I go crazy because here isn’t where I wanna be, and satisfaction feels like a distant memory,” Turner laments on “R U Mine?” It’s a lyric that can inspire a high schooler to yearn for simpler days on the playground, or prompt a 9-to-5 worker to aspire for a more alluring, invigorating life.

AM exists in a fantasy land between the 50s and the future, where guys in leather jackets and girls in knee socks flirt on dancefloors while sipping whiskey on the rocks, free from the nuisances of modern life. We keep returning to the album with the optimism that we’ll kiss a pair of lips that feel like “the galaxy’s edge”, or that someone will want to be our “vacuum cleaner, breathing in your dust”. And as long as it blares from our headphones as we stomp down the street in our black boots, it will let us believe that we’ll one day live lives half as cool, as cinematic, or as re-bloggable.