'Opening Night' arrives with minimal fanfare, which is exactly the right approach for a band that has learned, the hard way, that the bigger the announcement the higher the expectations. Arctic Monkeys dropped the new single in January to polite but genuine enthusiasm — and if it's not a revelation, it's something almost more valuable: a sign that the band has recalibrated.
The Car, their 2022 album, was the culmination of Alex Turner's orchestral-pop period: gorgeous, formally ambitious, and almost entirely severed from the scrappy Sheffield rock that made the band famous. The reaction was mixed in ways that seemed to genuinely surprise Turner. 'Opening Night' sounds like the band responding: the production is more grounded, the melody is more immediately accessible, Turner's vocal sits lower in the mix than the Midas-touch croon of The Car era.
The song opens with fingerpicked guitar — a small shock in itself, given the elaborate staging of recent Arctic Monkeys records — before building into something that feels like a band playing in a room together rather than a studio exercise in arrangement. 'Opening Night' is a title that carries obvious metaphorical weight, and Turner knows better than to be subtle about it.
Whether this signals a full return to guitar-forward rock, or whether it's one song that represents a slight pivot while the larger project continues in another direction, is impossible to say from a single. But 'Opening Night' is the best Arctic Monkeys single in at least five years. It sounds like they're interested in what they're doing again.
No album announcement yet, but this is clearly the first piece of something larger. The band is opening the show. Whatever follows will be the one people talk about. Grade: B+.