365 – New Music Daily

First things first with this review, we have to talk about the plays for this album. I knew Arctic Monkeys were big but what the fuck! This album has exactly 0 songs under 100 million plays on Spotify. In fact, only 4/12 songs on this album have less than 200 million – including three songs with well over 1 BILLION streams. Holy shit.

No need to beat around the bush here – while this might be classified as a rock album, it’s pop-rock at the very best, or rock that is designed (and succeeds) to appeal to a much broader audience than someone like Queens of the Stone Age. There are some really nice rock elements to this album – some fantastic fills on one of my favorite songs Arabella, some incredibly catchy riffs and vocal arrangements throughout the entire record, especially on something like R U Mine?.

I totally do understand the appeal of this record – it is super fucking catchy. It does lose me though on some of the more straightforward, poppier songs (Do I Wanna Know? I Wanna Be Yours), and a good deal of the other songs I just find to be OK, or another example of “If I wanted X, I’d go listen to Y”. If this is your favorite album in the past 10 years, I would understand – easy listening, catchy vocals (Alex Turner also does have a fantastic voice), groovy songs, etc. It is a pretty good album, just a bit too poppy for my own ears. I will check out other Arctic Monkeys though, and I do get the hype.

Favorite songs: R U Mine?, One For The Road, Arabella, I Want It All