A defining pop moment. Last year, aboard an early morning Glasgow-London train, we stopped at Preston where several Blackpool fans piled on to go to see their team play Millwall. One of them placed his phone on the table and proceeded to play Arctic Monkeys’ Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not from its tiny speaker, as the rest proudly sang along to every word. In fact, it was probably more of a defining sociological moment.

Where Alex Turner is concerned, you suspect that’s exactly the problem. Is it too picky to desire a level of popularity between empty Camden toilets and “new Oasis”? On Favourite Worst Nightmare lines jump out and you wonder if they mean what they sound as if they mean. Take, for instance, If You Were There, Beware, in which Turner sighs: “I don’t know what it is that they want/ But I haven’t got it to give.” Or Then Teddy Picker, in which the 21-year-old singer wonders: “Who wants to be men of the people when there’s people like you?”

At the same time Turner has said that he didn’t want to write an album about his postfame life — and by and large he has stuck to his word. With the rhythm section of Nick O’Malley and Matt Helders summoning a storm , Do Me a Favour sees Turner steering through the turbulence of a dying relationship with one of his most affecting lyrics to date — “tears on the steering wheel, dripping on the seat”. Old Yellow Bricks , meanwhile, is Billy Liar in reverse: “He wants to sleep in a city that never wakes up.” If it all sounds a little Smiths-like at times, that’s probably no accident. Turner’s love of Morrissey is known, but just as redolent of the Smiths here — especially the hammering heartbeat of The Bad Thing is the empathetic that way his colleagues play around the eccentricities of his metre.

A year of touring has done no harm either. Even ardent Monkeymaniacs struggled to excuse them the “funk” songs on that first album. This time around there’s little not to dance to — in particular This House is a Circus, which skates along Jamie Cook’s four-note guitar line before tumbling into a controlled avalanche. Now that individual downloads count towards the chart, there’s every chance that the once-remembered, never-forgotten Fluorescent Adolescent will be a hit, regardless of whether they release it.

A similar fate may also await the startling closer 505 — startling because, it’s quite possibly the rudest song delivered in a Sheffield accent since Jarvis Cocker turned psycho-sexual class warrior on I-Spy : “In my imagination, you’re waiting lying on your side with your hands between your thighs.” Young man!

At times — the current single Brianstorm being one of them — you find yourself wondering how they managed to make an album that eschews conventional song structure quite so melodic. Hats off to the producer, James Ford, for helping to keep the pressure of expectations at bay, and encouraging the band to experiment with the fragments that they had amassed until songs emerged.

By keeping their nerve Arctic Monkeys have coasted their way through what should have been the most difficult transition of their collective life. Early fears that they had abandoned verse-chorus immediacy for wilful obscurity need to be qualified. Favourite Worst Nightmare isn’t a verse-chorus sort of album. It’s way, way better than that.

(Domino)

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