Why'd You Only Call Me When You're High?

The AM-era Arctic Monkeys reinvented themselves as a leather-jacketed slow jam machine, and this is the record's most sardonic use of that costume. Everything drags on purpose — the drums thud with hip-hop weight and dry room reverb, the guitar answers in curt bluesy stabs, and those falsetto backing vocals from Helders and Nick O'Malley hover behind Turner like a doo-wop group hired for a bad night. Turner's delivery is smeared, half-crooned, deliberately unbothered in a way that betrays how bothered he is. The lyric is a very modern indignity rendered with novelistic precision: the 2 a.m. call from someone who only wants you when their judgment is chemically suspended, and the humiliation of picking up anyway. "The mirror's image tells me it's home time" is a small masterpiece of self-recognition. It's funny and pathetic at once, which is the record's whole trick — desert-rock swagger draped over profound neediness. Culturally it marked the band's crossover into American mainstream radio and their transformation from Sheffield chroniclers into something sleeker and more nocturnal. It belongs to the specific hour after a party ends, phone face-up on the table, deciding whether to answer.