Epic: How Arctic Monkeys' 'Suck It and See' remains a fan favourite fifteen years later

In April 2023, during The Car Tour, Arctic Monkeys played “Suck It And See” live for the first time in eight years. No announcement or fanfare. It appeared in the setlist in Linz, Austria, and fans treated it like a resurrection.

Suck It And See has always been the Arctic Monkeys album people arrive at last. Most listeners in India discovered the band through AM’s “Do I Wanna Know?” on a playlist or a recommendation. Then worked backwards through Humbug, Favourite Worst Nightmare, Whatever People Say I Am, and the fourth album got buried.

Turner wrote the songs alone on an acoustic guitar in his Brooklyn apartment in 2010, then flew guitarist Jamie Cook out to work on the parts. He had just discovered country music: Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, George Jones, artists he had spent his life dismissing. The writing came out stripped of performance, no character to hide behind, no distance to maintain. The title, a perfectly ordinary British phrase meaning “give it a try,” was considered so offensive in America that retail chains refused to stock it without a sticker. A Sheffield band, too British for America, chronically undersold.

The band reconvened in an East London synagogue for six weeks, where James Ford joined to cut rough demos on a handheld recorder. Ford had one condition before entering Sound City in Los Angeles: every lyric finalised, every structure locked, a two-mics-in-a-room version of the album done before Christmas. Tracks were recorded live through January 2011, one each day and no overdubbing, with Ford shaping arrangements across nearly every song.

“Do you look into the mirror to remind yourself you’re there, or has somebody’s goodnight kisses got that covered?” That line from “Love Is A Laserquest” is Turner without an armour. The melodic instincts that made AM feel enormous two years later are all present here. Fifteen years on, Suck It And See reads like a foundation, the record that taught Turner how to write the chart topping songs that followed after.

We are playing this album on the 13th June (Sat), from 6pm to 8pm at The Revolver Club, Mahim. See you there!