Balaclava

There's a barely-suppressed franticness to this one that makes it feel like the most physically urgent thing on the album. The guitars are wiry and fast, almost trebly in how they cut through the mix, and the whole track has the breathless quality of someone narrating while running. The central image — a masked figure, identity concealed, desire rendered anonymous and therefore more potent — gives Turner something genuinely strange to work with, and he leans into it without over-explaining, letting the specificity of the detail carry the weight. There's an erotic edge that's coded rather than stated, consistent with Turner's early talent for writing about desire with enough indirection that the listener does half the interpretive work themselves. Helders drives the song forward with the kind of drumming that sounds instinctive but is actually quite considered — fills that arrive exactly when the pressure needs releasing. The track is short, precise, almost curt, as if extended contemplation would ruin whatever quality makes it work. It doesn't build toward catharsis so much as maintain a single high-wire register throughout and then simply stop. In context of Arctic Monkeys' second album, it represents the band finding ways to be even more compressed and taut than the debut, as though they'd decided the only interesting challenge was to make tension feel comfortable. This is a song that works best unexpectedly, shuffled in, arriving without warning.