Arctic Monkeys Weren't 'Mentally Ready' To Play Stadiums Until Now

Arctic Monkeys just released their seventh album The Car and will celebrate with their first ever stadium tour in North America next year. Although it's kind of hard to believe this will be the band's first stadium tour, frontman Alex Turner admitted that he doesn't think they were "mentally ready" until now.

“It wouldn’t have made sense for us to play stadiums before this album,” he said in a recent interview with NME, “and I don’t think we were mentally ready for it up until now.”

“I don’t want to get ahead of myself and say that some of our songs ‘belong’ in a stadium, but they could definitely hang out in a stadium,” he added.

Turner went on to explain how he thinks songs on The Car have the same magic as "A Certain Romance" on their debut album Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not. “I remember when we were recording ‘A Certain Romance’ and having a conversation with the producer about the final guitar solo,” he said. “There’s something that happens at the end of that track where we break some rules in a single moment. We focused on the [emotional] effect of the instrumentals over the words – and I feel like we’ve been trying to do that again and again since then.”