AM by Arctic Monkeys

AM, Arctic Monkeys' fifth album, dropped on Domino in September 2013, and it's the moment these English indie kids turned into slinky, after-dark heavyweights. Longtime collaborator James Ford produced it with Ross Orton co-producing, at Sage & Sound Recording in Los Angeles and Rancho De La Luna in Joshua Tree, and Alex Turner has said the band set out to make a proper studio album this time, unlike Suck It and See.

The result is darker, groovier and sexier than anything they'd done: psychedelic rock, blues rock, heavy riffs and desert rock rubbing up against R&B, funk and soul, with the band dipping a toe into hip hop-style beats for the first time. They brought in new toys, too, including a Hohner Guitaret, a celeste and a vintage drum machine. "Do I Wanna Know?" crawls in on a slow, stomping riff, "R U Mine?" struts and snarls, and "Why'd You Only Call Me When You're High?" slinks around in the small hours. The songs circle sex, loneliness and soured romance, and Josh Homme, Bill Ryder-Jones and Pete Thomas all drop in along the way.

It was a smash. AM debuted at number one in the UK, their fifth straight album to do so, with more than 157,000 copies in its first week, became one of the UK's biggest vinyl sellers of the decade at 73,000, and opened at number six in the US, their best showing there. "Do I Wanna Know?" became their first Hot 100 entry. It won the Brit Award for British Album of the Year, picked up Mercury Prize and Grammy nominations, and went four-times platinum in the US in 2023.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.