Why Humbug is Arctic Monkeys' greatest album

Reading Festival, August 2009. One year after the release of Arctic Monkeys’ second album, Favourite Worst Nightmare, a crowd of rowdy rascals gathered to watch the Sheffield quartet perform their usual round of ditties on robotic dancing, miserable girlfriends and night bus rides home. That’s not what they got. Instead, Alex Turner – face hidden behind neck-length hair and sunglasses – began the eagerly-awaited set with a slew of moody songs from the band’s new album Humbug, released 10 years ago today.​

The group had evolved in front of everyone’s eyes and nobody quite knew what to do. Reports of a “lacklustre” performance swept the web and perhaps secured Humbug’s enduring status as the group’s biggest misstep. It’s an unfair legacy – the 10-track album is cast-iron proof of Arctic Monkeys’s willingness to step away from the crowd-pleasers that put them on the map and dive headfirst into uncharted territory. At once unexpected, bold and enticing, Humbug could well be Arctic Monkeys’ greatest album.

It’s certainly their most important – and one that wouldn’t have existed had their paths not collided with that of Queen of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme two years earlier. Turner and company bonded with the musician after performing the same 2007 concert in Houston that was attended by just 300 people. Noticing the boys seemed deflated, Homme reassured them, instructing them to continue down the path they were trailing with ease. “I was like, ‘No, this means you’re doing the right thing,’” Homme told BBC Radio 6 in 2014. It was an encounter that sparked the most crucial chapter in the band’s story. Had they not performed that poorly-attended gig, they never would have been encouraged to drive to Rancho de la Luna studio in the Joshua Tree desert to explore “the weird and the strange” under the rock star’s tutelage.

If record-breaking debut Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not (2007) and the following year’s Favourite Worst Nightmare established Turner as a songwriter of nifty chart toppers, Humbug was the record that indicated he was a musician to be reckoned with. Homme drew Turner’s moodiness to the fore, the lyricist’s striking metaphors going hand-in-hand with the record’s unpredictability. For the first time, he was compiling an album of tracks, bar the dreamy ballad “Cornerstone”, that were as chewy as the gobstoppers sung about in “Crying Lightning” or as labyrinthine as the halls of “Secret Door”.

Perhaps what threw people off was that Humbug required multiple listens to unlock its delights. Take, for instance, the sorely underrated “Dance Little Liar”, or the ferocious “Pretty Visitors”, a snarling beast of a track featuring an organ that might have been more at home on the soundtrack of a ghost train than an indie album: these are expertly-crafted songs that show Turner experimenting with vocal delivery as well as sound. To this day, they each get better every time you hear them and the latter remains a highlight of any Arctic Monkeys show.

For those music listeners who dare declare Humbug to be one of the band’s most prominent albums, it’s par for the course to be met with an eye-roll. But there’s no denying all the components are there; Turner just asks that you piece them together. The album is the group refusing to answer the prayers of tinnie-chugging fans who thought they’d keep releasing records filled with songs best belted out in random English fields, and their willingness to evolve should be commended. Without it, we wouldn’t have been treated to the rock’n’roll of AM or last year’s Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino.

Humbug should be considered not just Arctic Monkeys’s most important record, but also their greatest. Next time someone tries to make a case for the fact, maybe you should hold back on that eye-roll.