Jet Skis on the Moat

The lightest-footed thing on Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino, which is saying something on an album not known for levity. A nimble, almost breezy rhythm carries the track forward — the drums have a lounge-jazz looseness, the keyboards skip rather than brood, and the overall production breathes with unusual openness compared to the album's more hermetically sealed tracks. Turner's vocal is playful in a way he rarely permits himself, the delivery carrying a grin even as the imagery grows increasingly surreal and pointed. The song deploys absurdist luxury imagery — the titular jet skis, architectural excess, the trappings of conspicuous wealth rendered in such extreme detail that they tip from aspiration into satire. It's a song about the theatrics of power and money, about how the very rich signal their remove from ordinary life through increasingly baroque gestures. There's something of the English music hall tradition in its comic observational energy, the way it catalogues excess with a straight face that is clearly barely containing laughter. It belongs to a strand of Arctic Monkeys work that uses humour as a way of getting at serious things sideways, the joke and the critique arriving simultaneously so you can't fully separate them. This one plays well in the afternoon, when the sun is doing something golden and you want something that moves easily but leaves a slight aftertaste of unease.