Arabella

The song Arabella by Arctic Monkeys is a good example of how the band managed to blend disparate influences to create something of their own. It is described as an amalgamation that unites the sound of late nineties hip hop and R&B with the hard rock of the seventies. If you look at the references, you can hear echoes of bands like Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin, but there is also a futuristic touch that is reminiscent of Dr Dre. The lyrics, for their part, paint a portrait of a woman with a mindset from another era but connected to the present, as if she came "from outer space". The song's duration is 3 minutes and 27 seconds.

This track, which is part of the group's fifth studio album, AM, was released as a single in Italy on January 28, 2014, and in the United Kingdom on March 10 of the same year. The band had already presented it live on August 30, 2013, during the Zurich Openair festival, as part of the AM Tour. Interestingly, in their live performances, they sometimes include a snippet of Black Sabbath's War Pigs just before performing Arabella. This is done to give Alex Turner time to prepare a different guitar for the solo, and it is due to the similarities shared by the riffs of both songs. The music video for Arabella, directed by Jake Nava, premiered on March 2, 2014. After its release as a single, the song managed to chart on lists such as the UK Singles Chart and the UK Indie Chart, and even reached number 7 in the Belgian region of Flanders.