#euro arctic

[444rockstargf]

so happy your requests are open tbfh, could you write something (for euro, he is so MEEEEOOWWW) about reader being a sibling of one of the other band members and they hate each other and then SEX!!

thats as specific as i can get i fear 😭 i love your work so much thanks for your time girl!!

thank you for the request babe! (this is absolutely scrumptious.)

"big, bad, naughty rock star." | euronymous

big bad wolf. - lana del rey

✮⋆˙ [tags] @faesucksass @lustkillers @mayathepsychic1999 @josibunn @si1nful-symph0ny @vanlisbon @livingdead-reilly @oliviah-25 @lankysimp@auggiethecreator @livingdead-materialgirl @monkeyfart @imoonkiss @nom-nommmm1 @xxbl00d-cl0txx @k1ll3rh0rr0r @wildathevrt

female!reader x r!euronymous

word count: 1.6k

contents: brother's best friend type relationship, tension, drinking, unprotected p in v, implications of masturbation, creampie, overstimulation, not proofread!!!

heavy metal music tore through the thin walls of your house, the noise from the basement sounding as deafening as ever from your bedroom. you were lying on your bed, eyes closed as vibrations filled your body.

you groaned, rolling off your bed as the pounding sensation in your head grew more intolerable by each passing second. truth be told, you had no problem with death metal. your brother was into it, so that automatically meant that it would rub off on you. but what you didn’t like was attention-hungry guitarists who didn’t know when to give the ear-piercing riffs a break.

you stormed down two flights of stairs, making your way to the source of the racket. you swung open the door, causing the music to come to an immiediate halt and all eyes to turn to you. euronymous’, or rather oystein’s gaze caught your eye first. it was icy and cold and bitter like the depths of the arctic.

you placed your hands on your hips, your friendly eyes turning to slits as you met his glare. “can you animals keep it down in here? i’d hate to fall asleep to your music and suddenly wake up in the pits of hell.” jan axel, your brother, smirked at your comment with a little chuckle. “no problem. we’d hate to interrupt your beauty sleep.” you swatted him off, turning and walking away from the atmosphere.

you felt a pair of predatory eyes on you the entire time, probably studying you. you had shown up in a lacy camisole top, tiny black shorts and white thigh-high socks with little pink bows on them, an outfit that would now be engraved in euronymous’ mind for the rest of time. he watched you walk up the stairs as his band continued playing, watching your ass jiggle with each step you took.

then he turned to your brother.

“why the fuck do you let her walk all over you like that? she bitches and whines like a goddamn 12 year old.” jan scoffs. “c’mon man, that’s my little sister. and you know she’s 18. you were even at that big birthday party of her’s, remember?”

oh yes, he remembered. the night you got blackout drunk and tried to lead him on, leading to a very sloppy hookup that also happened to be the night he lost his virginity, to you. but you didn’t remember any of this, and that was probably for the best. so all you viewed him as was that weird guy that hung out with your brother. 

euronymous rubbed a hand over his face. “she’s a fuckin’ brat, dude. and she dresses like a damn hooker. you can’t just let her do whatever the hell she wants around here. one way or another, it’ll ruin our band.” jan brushed him off. “whatever, man. she’s her own person. she’s a woman, so it’d be pretty fucked up for me to be bossing her around.” he flipped over his sheet music. “from the top.”

euronymous placed his guitar on it’s stand. “i’m grabbing a beer.” he muttered, making his way to the stairs and bolting up them. that’s when he saw you in the kitchen, squirting whipped cream into your mouth from the can. he felt heat pooling in his core from the sight. “oh, fuck me…” he muttered under his breath, making you turn your head to him.

“the grumpy old troll crawled out of his cave, hm?” you taunted. he rolled his eyes, spitting back a snarky response. “why don’t you crawl back into whatever fairytale you lept out from.” you snarled, the expression on your face making euronymous’ knees weak. you opened the fridge, putting the whipped cream back and grabbing a bottle of beer. the last one.

you started heading back to your room until you felt a calloused hand grip your wrist, pulling you back. “i was gonna take that.” his eyes bored into your soul, but you put on a fake-pout. “well that’s too bad.” you licked around the tip of the bottle, claiming your territory in attempt to disgust him enough to leave you alone. but his pupils dilated when he saw your pink tongue smear saliva across the bottle, awakening something primal in him.

you hopped up the stairs, giving him a view of your legs in such innocent yet provocative clothing. without thining, he followed you up, walking into your room behind you and pinning you to the door by your chest. your eyes widened as the door shut behind you, your heart hammering inside of your chest.

“what the hell are you doing, oystein? jan would murder you if he saw you doing this.” euronymous didn’t have anything to say to that, so his mouth gaped open slightly as he studied your features. you looked like if your brother was crossed with a cute little child’s doll. your eyes shimmered with intense emotion, and he imagined what they’d look like as they rolled to the back of his head while he fucked you. 

he watched the top of your breasts rise and fall with each heavy breath you took, feeling a very familiar sensation in his jeans. one that he always felt whenever he saw you. he shook himself back to reality, plucking the beer out of your hand. “a pretty girl like you shouldn’t be drinking this. besides, you’re a kid.” your cheeks puffed up with anger. “you’re like 6 months older than me, asshole.”

he shrugged, leaning against your wall and taking a large swig of beer, looking around your bedroom. as pink and girly as it was, it all became much more lewd the longer he looked. there were bras and panties slung across almost every surface, smutty books filling your bookshelves, and a pretty pink vibrator that failed to be hidden underneath your pillow.

euronymous smirked, walking toward your bed and picking it up, switching it on. “well what do we have here?” your breath left your lungs as he held it, quickly rushing up to him and snatching it. “dont touch that!” he laughed bitterly, looking you right in the eye. “so turns out princess bubblegum’s a fucking whore.” you felt your cheeks heating up as he continued to speak.

“did you get to cum, dolly? or was the sound of real music too much for your pretty little ears?” you opened your drawer, tossing the vibrator into it and slamming it shut. then you felt two strong arms wrap around your waist, picking you up and throwing you onto your bed.

everything was happening too fast for you, but the next thing you knew euronymous was on top of you, your faces less than an inch apart as his tone turned into one of lust and desire. “i asked you a question, angel. did that stupid toy make you cum?” you gulped, your core starting to drip from the words he spoke.

you shook your head, causing him to smile. he pushed your legs apart, letting himself in between them and pressing his burning erection onto your clothed pussy, making you gasp. he trailed his hand down your body, his fingers slithering under the waistband of your shorts and stopping at your panties, feeling the sopping wet mess underneath the thin, lacy fabric.

your limbs turned to jelly as a moan slipped from your lips. he began to rub slow circles onto your hard clit, feeling it’s throbbing response.he used his other hand to slip of your shorts, then your panties, taking off your clothes layer by layer until only your socks were left. but he left those on. he thought they were a nice touch.

one thing led to another, and he was pounding into you from behind, his fingers shoved down your throat as he stretched out your tiny little pussy with his monstrous cock.

your back arched as he pressed you into the mattress, feeding on your desperate moans and whimpers like a starved beast. “like that, doll? is that the spot?” he cooed, obviously mocking you. you were a sobbing mess, your mascara running down your face as you drooled around his large fingers.

he looked down at you from where he was, watching your ass bounce with each hard thrust. he watched the curve of your back as his dick made you lose all control of your senses. you would never admit it to him, but he made you feel much better than that stupid vibrator did.

“i-im cumming, oystein..!” you managed to cry out, his finger muffling your words. you had gushed and creamed and squirted around him so many times by now that you had lost count. but body was weak beyond its limits, but he refused to stop. he just kept on pushing, his deep, hoarse groans eoching through your bedroom walls.

he landed a harsh slap onto your bruised ass, making you yelp. his thrusts began to lose their composure as he spoke, his voice breaking. “c-can you cum f’me one more time, baby… can you do that for me..?” you nodded frantically, tears rolling down your face and staining your bedsheets.

his cock throbbed inside of your pulsating hole, creating a wet and sticky mess as cum poured down your thighs and stomach. and then he began to shout, his voice coming out as a booming roar. “goddamnit!” he forced himself all the way in, making your heart stop for a moment as he filled you up with his molten hot cum. he gave you a few more lazy thrusts, his groans turning into little whimpers before he pulled out, shooting a few last ropes onto your arched back.

you laid there, panting like a dog as the realization hit you. your brother’s best friend had just fucked you. the one that you had never gotten along with. the one who swore he’d kill himself if you ever got a man to touch you. the one who longed for the day that he’d finally get to claim a pure soul like yours as his own. and now, he’d finally done it. again.

author's note: i ran to write this as soon as I got the request. goodnight yall :))

[mariacallous]

On January 9, 2024, Swedish defense chief Gen. Micael Byden stood on a stage in Salen, Sweden, and gave a presentation intended to shock. Projecting a series of grisly images from the front lines of the Ukraine War, overlaid on a backdrop of snowy Swedish field, he asked: “Do you think this could be Sweden?”

Until February 2022, these questions would be unimaginable for a country that has maintained a careful 75-year strategy of peaceful nonalignment toward NATO. In a 2012 speech, the supreme commander of Sweden’s military at the time, Sverker Goranson, said that, in the event of an attack, “Sweden can survive for a week.” But at this recent Society and Defense Conference in Salen, leaders made it clear that the era of de-emphasizing defense was over. There, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson urged his citizens to prepare to defend themselves “with weapons in hand and our lives on the line.”

For Russia’s Scandinavian neighbors, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine disrupted a cool calculus of neutrality. Last year, Finland became NATO’s newest member, with Sweden likely soon to follow, pending approval from Hungary. These new northern alliances are shifting the geopolitical power balance, with Arctic NATO nations soon outnumbering Russia seven to one. And, just as the melting Arctic ice opens new resources and routes for global economic competition, it also exposes new defensive vulnerabilities.

Today, as Ukraine and its NATO allies push Russia into a corner, global leaders—together with Scandinavians themselves—are increasingly turning a troubled gaze north. They’re asking: How likely is escalation in colder climes?

“The increasing competition and militarization in the Arctic region … is worrying,” NATO military committee chair Adm. Rob Bauer said in an October 2023 speech at the Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik, Iceland. “We must be prepared for military conflicts arising in the Arctic.”

“Low tensions in the High North”: so have global leaders and analysts referred to a post-Cold War period of relative polar stability. For the past several decades, bilateral and international agreements between Russia and other Arctic states have emphasized shared northern security as well as scientific and safety interests. But after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, these arrangements quickly fell apart. In March 2022, the Arctic Council, a forum between the eight Arctic states, suspended talks. (In May 2023, it cautiously resumed but has yet to make Russia’s involvement clear.) In September 2023, Russia left the smaller Barents Euro-Arctic Council with Norway, Finland, and Sweden—saying the Scandinavian states had “paralyzed” cooperation. In February 2023, Russia amended its Arctic policy, emphasizing new alliances with other BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) nations, particularly China. That month, it also suspended participation in New START, the last remaining nuclear arms control agreement between the United States and Russia.

“There’s this post-Cold War political idea of ‘Arctic exceptionalism,’ that the north is excepted from developments in global politics,” said Rasmus Bertelsen, the Barents chair in politics at the Arctic University in Tromso. “The problem is, it’s never been valid.”

Look a little closer at the past decades, Bertelsen said, and you’ll see a Russian Arctic strategy that closely follows its global agenda. In 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech at the Munich Security Conference firmly rejected a U.S.-led, post-Cold War global order of stability. That same year, Russia launched its first cyberattack on Estonia and made a bold Arctic territorial claim by planting a Russian flag in the seabed below the North Pole. Putin has also concentrated militarization around the High North. Since 2014, the year Russia annexed Crimea, Russia has steadily grown a northern fleet of nuclear submarines, surface ships, missile facilities, air fleets, and radar stations. Today, Russia’s largest military base is on the Kola Peninsula, which borders Norway and Finland, where it is also testing new hypersonic missiles and a nuclear torpedo drone. Though about 80 percent of Russia’s northern land forces were deployed to Ukraine, its air and sea forces remain intact.

“Earlier, Russia had an interest in seeming like a constructive partner, including in the Arctic,” said Andreas Osthagen, a senior fellow at the Arctic Institute in Oslo, Norway. “Just like in the rest of the world, that has deteriorated.”

Russia’s full-scale invasion came as a wake-up call to Scandinavian neighbors that have, for decades, resisted militaristic alliances. Suddenly, neutrality began to look a lot more like vulnerability. Finland had an especially stunning reversal: As recently as December 2021, 51 percent of Finns opposed joining NATO. Today, 78 percent support the membership. With this alliance comes the promise of U.S. military might. In 2023, Finland and Sweden both signed bilateral military agreements with the United States, permitting American personnel and weapons at dozens of bases, including nine in the Arctic. Norway, an active NATO member since its formation, already has several bases that permit U.S. personnel and weapons. Still, since the Cold War, Norway has followed a “reassurance” policy that limits NATO and its allies’ presence past the 28th longitudinal zone, close to Russia. Now, it’s unclear whether that policy will hold.

Since 2009, the Nordic Defense Cooperation has aligned Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland on national military policy. In 2022, Norway, Finland and Sweden announced an agreement to strengthen the alliance with a focus on the high North. Today, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland are in ongoing talks about formally sharing their air forces. In March 2024, Norway will lead an expanded “Nordic response” exercise for these nations to test their coordinated defense plans. Michael Paul, a senior fellow in security policy at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, said that history will reveal this new Nordic alliance as “one of Putin’s greatest mistakes.”

“If the war in Ukraine has achieved anything, it’s to align the Nordics on security,” Paul said. “You want to divide your enemies, not unite them against you.”

Ferguson sees the U.S. Swedish and Finnish military bases as mutually beneficial: Where the U.S. has resources, it often lacks technical expertise in extreme conditions. These smaller nations, she said, have a lot to teach the United States military. And their alliance with NATO is, she said, a “game-changer.”

“We now have seven out of eight Arctic nations geopolitically aligned with highly capable militaries,” Ferguson said. “I don’t know if there is such a concentration of alignment and capabilities between nations anywhere else in the world.”

Still, Ferguson emphasized that this is all in the name of deterrence. And experts agree that a full-scale northern conflict is unlikely. Paradoxically, Paul noted, Russia’s sheer military capacity and economic resources that increase Arctic tensions also deter real escalation. In the north, Russia simply has too much to lose: The immense territorial mass and extensive fossil fuel resources both stand as major claims to its identity as a global superpower. And unlike the cases of Ukraine and Crimea, Putin has never publicly imagined reclaiming Finland, which declared independence from Russia in 1917, nor has he spoken about accessing the Atlantic through Norway. Paul said that the Kremlin has an interest in maintaining a “low level of tension” in the north.

For now, that has meant hybrid warfare: “gray zone” tactics that are harder to trace or attribute. For instance, in November 2023, after a massive surge of asylum-seekers prompted Finland to become the first neighbor to close its border to Russia, Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo called the move “instrumentalized immigration”; that is, retaliation for joining NATO. (Russia denied the charge.)

At sea, potential aggression is even harder to trace. In April 2021 and January 2022, fiber-optic cables connecting the Svalbard archipelago to the Norwegian mainland was mysteriously severed. Later, vessel-tracking data revealed, in both instances, that Russian fishing boats had passed repeatedly over the cables prior to the damage. In October 2023, a Chinese container ship called the Newnew Polar Bear damaged a Baltic gas pipeline before entering Russian waters. According to the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation, a severed anchor likely belonging to the ship caused the damage, but experts still dispute whether the damage was intentional. Proving malicious intent is extremely difficult, and investigations are ongoing.

“It’s one of the major questions being asked right now: How do we defend against attacks on subsea critical infrastructure?” said Marisol Maddox, a senior Arctic analyst at the Polar Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. “There hasn’t been a single instance of serious consequences. At this point, the lesson that Russia is learning is that they can get away with it.”

Intentional or not, the effects of such infrastructure damage can be extensive and long-lasting: For example, the fiber-optic cable damaged in April 2021 wasn’t identified and repaired until November of that year. Luckily, one other subsea cable remained to keep the lights on in Svalbard. But absent that redundancy, thousands of people could have been left stranded without power for months. In the event of an explicit conflict, Maddox said, those kinds of vulnerabilities are extremely worrying.

In highly militarized zones, mistakes may carry the highest risk. To Osthagen, “miscalculation and misinterpretation” are the “greatest security risk in the North Atlantic Arctic.” In this region, Russia and NATO both conduct frequent military exercises, rehearsing mobilization of their forces and fleets. These routine rehearsals are especially necessary in colder climates, which require cold-resilient equipment and technology. (Notably, Osthagen emphasized, Russia has simulated direct attacks on its neighbors, whereas NATO has strictly simulated defensive strategies.) But these are complicated operations, often testing people and procedures for the first time. All it takes is one accidentally discharged firearm, one crossed signal, for rehearsal to open a military theater. Typically, such exercises are clearly communicated and coordinated across borders. But more recently, this communication has suffered.

“Paradoxically, after February 2022, the tension and fear of something happening has increased, whereas the potential for dialogue has disappeared,” Osthagen said. “This is the most troubling aspect of all.”

And where does this warfare, hybrid or explicit, end? In the worst case, the current war in Ukraine could conclude with a northern strike. Russia has 11 submarines capable of launching long-range nuclear weapons; eight of them reside in the Kola Peninsula. For this reason alone, the Arctic carries a particular weight for global leaders who must consider escalation to its absolute hypothetical end.

Even so, Paul emphasized that Arctic conflict of any form still remains counter to Russia’s interests and is less likely than in other parts of the world. Still, he cautioned against assuming that Putin will behave rationally. If backed into a corner, as NATO expands and Ukrainian troops advance, it is impossible to know how he will respond. But a fact remains that Arctic nations won’t easily forget: The remainder of his military might centers on the north.

“Putin made a big mistake in Ukraine,” Paul said. “He could make another in the Arctic.”

[flannelfoxen]

F.ox colors!

Here are my personal f.ox pelts as of 4/25/23. Largest is 66” (ranched smokey and ranched silver ringneck) and smallest is 35” (wild silver pup).

From left to right:

Ranched: wild red color, dark Euro smokey, Euro silver ringneck, silver whitemark, red platinum, Euro mystery hybrid, Euro hybrid apricot frost, blue arctic.

Wild: Canadian arctic, Canadian gray color arctic, NA gray, SA gray, swift, Canadian silver pup, NA red, Euro red, light Euro red, light Euro smokey.

[mrschwartz]

Alex Turner opens up about The Car, Arctic Monkeys' 20th anniversary album

The frontman of the British band that performs at Primavera Sound, in São Paulo, invests in more abstract lyrics in new album

Published October 16 2022, by Rodrigo Salem

Alex Turner is not satisfied with the lighting in the room chosen as the setting for our interview. It's a small, cozy hipster hotel in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, one of those above a cafe with tables occupied by young people at the computer, and no lines at cash registers that don't accept cash.

The frontman of Arctic Monkeys, the biggest rock band to come out of the UK in the last 20 years, flips the switches until he finds the perfect balance of light. "Is this okay for you?" he asks, but doesn't seem to care too much about the answer.

Turner likes to have complete control over his environment. "Where do you want to sit? This will be the best place, right?" he asks, coffee in hand, already standing in front of a small beige table below the lamp that insisted on not emanating the adequate light.

Shy to the point of never completing a full sentence, as if his mouth didn't keep up with his fast brain, Turner is acutely aware of his obsession with control and attention to detail, something that has only grown bigger in the last few years at the helm of the band. But the singer, guitarist and songwriter lived something different in the creation of The Car, the group's seventh album, which will be released worldwide this week.

After composing the piano demos alone for much of the pandemic, he was reunited with the rest of the band over the summer of last year, in a secluded house that was part of a 12th-century monastery in Suffolk, on the east coast of England.

"We hadn't done that since the first album. I had extra film rolls and I took my 16mm camera to film everything and keep myself busy during the recording. At first, I just wanted to record the memory, but it seemed to help in the work environment, because I stepped out of the process a bit and gave everyone more space," he says.

"James [Ford, record producer] was delighted, because I wasn't looking over his shoulder all the time and being a twat."

The musician's hobby as a filmmaker was not the only novelty in the three weeks of work in the makeshift studio, complete with a piano borrowed from a resident there and the technological arsenal brought in from London. The period was essential for Arctic Monkeys to remember that they are still a rock group formed by friends.

"We had a lot of laughs and watched the Euro Cup together. It was important to have that band energy again," says Turner, revealing that Body Paint, The Car's latest single, only took its final form because of this camaraderie. "The distorted guitar at the end just came about because I wanted to do that solo with them. It sounds obvious, but being together changes the dynamics of how I play."

Ironically, the album's main theme seems to circle around characters that don't seem to fit the environment they're in. In Body Paint itself, which wouldn't be out of place in one of George Martin's orchestrated productions for The Beatles, Turner sings that he's "keeping on [his] costume and calling it a writing tool."

Jet Skis On The Moat, played on a sultry guitar and with a broken rhythm reminiscent of U2's The Playboy Mansion, brings a Hollywood psychedelic mood—"jet skis on the moat / they filmed everything in CinemaScope, but this is the last time you will ride them, though".

"I was imagining this perception of us living like rock stars in a fantasy castle on a mountain, riding jet skis, disconnected from everything," says Turner.

In I Ain't Quite Where I Think I Am, he seems to describe a strange trip on a luxury yacht off the coast of France, a country where he usually goes with his girlfriend, French singer Louise Verneuil, since he moved back to England from Los Angeles. "I spend less time here, but I love this city. It's where I have my friends," he says.

Extremely protective of his privacy, Alex Turner does not confirm any theories that could refer to his life beyond music. However, he admits that feeling like a fish out of water is one of the themes of the record. "I've definitely written this time about someone who doesn't fit in," he says as he pulls out of his green jacket two folded sheets of paper filled with his lyrics and assorted notes.

I question the reason for keeping this material around and the singer lets his guard down. "I think that this way I can have these conversations more easily, and stay on the same level as other people. You've read the lyrics, listened to the record, and I thought I should do the same to meet you in the middle," he says, soon bringing back up his good-humored defenses. "And it also serves to intimidate people."

Not that he seems to want to intimidate anyone. Turner can barely look up, more concerned with focusing on some object and finding the right words for his answers. Keeping the lyrics in your pocket serves to rediscover the words of the songs.

One of the most brilliant songwriters of modern British rock and someone who has managed to portray the yearnings and feelings of an entire millennial generation, he says his lyrics come out of the space between the conscious and the unconscious.

In The Car, they seem even more abstract. "I love leaving space for lyrics not to be fully understood and to become more interesting as the years go by. I like to explore things that are difficult to talk about."

Does that mean that Alex Turner, who, two decades ago, rehearsed in a garage with Jamie Cook on guitar, Andy Nicholson on bass, later replaced by Nick O'Malley, and Matt Helders on drums, in Sheffield, is finally noticing the inevitable passage of time?

"Funny, it's hard to accept that it's been 20 years," he says. "But we're alive and active. That happens a lot when I'm singing the old songs now. I remember something, not necessarily the lyrics, but the environment, a person and the sensations of the past."

A rich past, we must add. Arctic Monkeys have gone through several phases in these two decades. It began with the confessional hip-hop-enamored rock of the first two albums, a formula that propelled the group into the stratosphere of fame. It gained weight with the stoner rock of Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age on 2009's Humbug and the stadium hard rock of 2013's AM. And it culminated in the journey away from Earth in 2018's jazzy Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino.

The Car continues the sonic exploration of their previous work, but brings guitars back to the songs and a Turner interested in using his voice as an instrument. "I don't know if Alex from 20 years ago would like this sound," he wonders. "Secretly, I wanted something along those lines then, but it wasn't within my reach at the time. On second thought, I think he would like it. But if he wouldn't like it, then fuck it," he jokes.

He admits that he changed his way of looking at music and even composing. On previous albums, he wrote the lyrics and then thought of the melody. The music now comes first.

"I made an effort to put the lyrics in sync with a melody that gives me permission to use certain words," says the musician. "I didn't focus on that in the past, I think it started on AM, when I started to change the lyrics as I was influenced by the sound in the studio."

Back on stage since a few weeks ago, Turner believes the pandemic has changed the relationship between band and audience. "The first time we performed was powerful," he says. "There's a new energy that encourages me. I'm trying not to behave the same way on stage. I think some of that comes from the younger crowd."

Brazil is going to feel this in a few days. Arctic Monkeys closes the first day of Primavera Sound, in São Paulo, on November 5th, already oiling the show with a new repertoire. "When we arrive in Brazil, I want to test two new songs and leave some old ones behind," says the singer, who already says that the next album may come out faster than expected after the long gestation of The Car.

Unable to play shows, the group spent a year polishing up the album in post-production. "We had more time to work on the record and I like to think that this had a positive influence on the final result, as we had more space to hone, think and fight for certain ideas", says Turner. "I love the idea of doing something different, like writing, recording and releasing in a week. Maybe it's a fun idea for the next project."

[usafphantom2]

Greece evaluates sale of Mirage 2000 jets to India 🇮🇳

Although the expected selling price is modest, Athens sees an opportunity for broader strategic cooperation with New Delhi.

Fernando Valduga By Fernando Valduga 02/08/2024 - 19:28in Military

The leadership of the Hellenic Air Force is exploring the possibility of selling the 18 Mirage 2000 EGM/BGM to India, a proposal that was communicated to the Prime Minister's office and the Ministry of National Defense of Greece.

The aircraft served until 2022 in the 332ª "Hawk" Squadron, and most of them are not in flight condition, while some were cannibalized to keep the others flying. However, it seems that there is fertile ground between the two parties and do not rule out the possibility of the subject of the sale of the fighters to be discussed during the future visit of Prime Minister K. Mitsotakis to New Delhi.

Squadron 332 struggled with problems of availability of the Mirage 2000, resulting in the abandonment of some aircraft on the runways of Tanagra and others cannibalized because they were beyond the operational life.

At the end of 2023, New Delhi decided to communicate its interest to the Greek part in acquiring used Mirage 2000, as it plans to keep these fighters in service for at least another decade. Athens, aiming to further strengthen defense relations with India, has already decided to sell the retired Mirage. The Air Force General Staff expects to profit

However, the criterion for its sale is more political than economic. In the General Staff of the Greek Air Force, which is directly involved, they do not expect profits. On the contrary, they maintain modest expectations regarding the selling price of aircraft, which are unfortunately in poor condition. The experts' estimate is that, at best, they will be sold for a few million euros.

These 18 Mirage, which carried the weight of the interceptions in the skies of the Aegean Sea, were withdrawn from service in January 2022 with the arrival of the Rafale. The aircraft were inactivated due to lack of support long before the arrival of the new French fighters. However, there are still users of the French delta fighter, such as India, which maintains about 50 aircraft in three combat squads and may be interested in supplementing any losses or renewing its stock of spare parts for existing ones.

The Hellenic Air Force is also evaluating the future of the newest Mirage 2000-5 operated by Squadron 331 "Teseu". Although the support contract has improved its availability, concerns about its compatibility with evolving technologies and high integration costs, such as the proposed Link-16 terminal, have led to a reassessment.

Tags: Military AviationHAF - Hellenic Air Force / Greek Air ForceIAF - Indian Air Force/Air Force of IndiaMirage 2000

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Fernando Valduga

Fernando Valduga

Aviation photographer and pilot since 1992, he has participated in several events and air operations, such as Cruzex, AirVenture, Dayton Airshow and FIDAE. He has works published in specialized aviation magazines in Brazil and abroad. He uses Canon equipment during his photographic work in the world of aviation.

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[gabigabigabby]

just wanna be yours | e. smith rowe

emile smith rowe x mount!reader

a/n: this idea just came to me after seeing all the tiktoks of arctic monkeys' show at the emirates stadium as well as my prolonging obsession for arsenal's number ten. enjoy! ⭐️

synopsis: you and emile attend arctic monkeys' show at the emirates

warnings/content: fluff that makes me want to gouge my eyes out, emile literally being the best bf in the world, reader is just a teeny bit autistic, devyn riker is reader's best friend and emile's cousin, lmk if i missed out anything! 🩷

you almost wanted to throw emile onto the bed and kiss him all over when you found out the surprise he'd been keeping from you for almost two weeks.

apparently for emile, being a gunner has its benefits; the benefits being receiving free tickets to shows held at the emirates. he had received two free moshpit tickets from edu to the arctic monkeys' london show at the emirates. now, he knew how much of an arctic monkeys fan you are, so he decided to surprise you as you were eating dinner together in the comfort of your shared home.

"babe, don't you get too excited now and start hittin' me," emile began. "but edu passed me these at training two weeks ago," sliding the tickets across the countertop, it took you a moment to fathom the fact that emile just slid two tickets to the arctic monkeys show at the emirates to you; the show you'd been begging him for tickets to. "he knows you're a fan, but i know you know i'm not really a fan and so i didn't think you'd want to go with me because of that—" you picked up the tickets from the counter, skimming your eyes through them very quickly, before it hit you like a brick wall.

"arctic monkeys?" you finally spoke when it all finally clicked. "i'm going to see alex turner with my own eyes?!"

"yeah, again, i really dunno who that is, but-" before emile could even finish his sentence, your arms had found themselves over his shoulders, and as you pull away, you showed emile your trembling hands. "babe, calm down! rah." emile laughed, pulling one of your hands into his and pressing his other hand over top. it is something he does everytime your hands begin to tremble.

"you can tell me that when we're right in front of alex turner!" you shouted, pulling your hand away. "these are moshpit tickets, ems! how'd edu get these?"

"y'know, he's the sporting director. he's the man," emile shrugged coolly. "when the man has connections, cool things happen." you couldn't contain your excitement, to the point where you started spinning over to your tv, opening the spotify app and looking for that arctic monkeys playlist you listen to everytime you had to complete your chores.

i wanna be yours started playing on the speakers, booming throughout the apartment as emile giggled to himself, watching you spin slowly like you're in a disney movie. or like you're in greece in the summer. "wait," you paused, stopping the music halfway. "you're asking me to go with you?"

"y-yeah, kind of," emile stuttered, his hand rubbing the back of his neck. "i wanna see what all the hype is about. and you know, just wanted to spend a little more time with you," emile chuckled, getting up from his seat and slowly making his way towards you. "know i haven't really been home lately because of the euros and whatnot. and i wanna make it up to you, y'know? don't go with devyn, or-or mase... or declan, even. go with me."

at this point, emile had found himself before you as he reaches for your hands, you obliging to his actions. "go to the show with me."

you have no words, truly. this was the first time emile wanted to show his interest in what you love. but truly, it was about time he did after you've dealt with four years of his football and four years of the arsenal. it's time he did something for you for a change.

"okay," you replied, emile's eyes lighting up. "i won't take my superfan of a big brother, mason, and i'll go with you. the boy who knows nothing."

"i will know most things by the end of tomorrow," emile said, confidence laced heavy on his tone. "i promise."

—

you didn't live far from the emirates, so you and emile had the chance to take a short stroll down the street. you still couldn't believe you had received the greatest concert tickets one could ever get. today has got to be one of those days where you're grateful emile's job requires him to do it in a stadium, a place where not only football games happen, but concerts too.

"how buzzed are you?" emile takes the opportunity to ask you as you've been dead silent since you left the apartment building.

"buzzed as hell!" you unconsciously shout out, causing emile to jump a little. "sorry. i can't help but flip."

"it's alright," emile giggles. "i'm glad you're happy."

"i—" you shout again before realising that you're shouting. "am too. sorry. and thank you again for the tickets."

emile shakes his head. "don't thank me, thank edu. he's at the emirates tonight." before you could even give him an answer, your phone starts to buzz in your back pocket. with emile's hand still in yours, you pull out your phone and check the caller id. it's devyn requesting to facetime.

sliding the call icon towards the right, devyn's face appears on your phone screen. "you got tickets to the emirates show?!" she screams.

"rah," emile groans, shutting his ear with his free hand. "piss off, devyn!"

"shut up, emile. wait, how did you get tickets?" devyn ignores emile's presence. you giggle before looking to emile, signalling to him whether you should reveal your secret to getting concert tickets or not. emile was shaking his head like don't tell her edu gave these to us.

"emile got them for me." you finally come up with a false answer, which made emile blow out a breath of relief. on the other side, devyn answers with a confused what? as the both of you start making your way onto the bridge that connects the street you were previously walking on to the vicinity of the emirates stadium.

"yes, i got her those tickets myself. now, piss off, devil, you're ruining date night," emile's cockney accent passes through devyn's phone as he hastily presses the hang up button. devyn still had time to blurt out a send me pics and vids! before the call was over. "you have really annoying friends, babe."

"she's your cousin. people outside of our circle would be worried, what with you telling her to piss off 24/7." you laugh, the both of you handing over your tickets to the usher who allows you into the vip tunnel.

"it's true! she's always buggin' you! such a rat, her." emile shakes his head before stepping ahead of you, allowing him to lead you to your concert spot. he had put his left hand behind him and did the grabby hand gesture, calling for your hand to come and hold his so he knows that you'll always stay close.

emile can get very paranoid about you sometimes, especially at arsenal home games where the crowd is bigger than ever. he would always ask for mikel's permission for you to ride on the tour bus with the lads rather than drive and get stuck in traffic. he'd rather be the person that takes you to the vip box than the very aggressive guards that line the perimeter of the spectators' seats.

arriving at the vip standing corner, you find yourself with your arms wrapped around the blond boy as you shiver from the london cold. you were clad in a black sweater, but the winter seemed to find its way through the thick material and prick on your skin. lucky for you, emile had been wearing a black puffy jacket and you were tiny enough to fit into it with him. emile instinctively covers you beneath his jacket with his arms around you.

as soon as alex turner and his band makes their entrance and begins to play the first song on the setlist, you had already warmed up as you start jumping to the upbeat music. emile volunteered to be the person recording every single song because of his very little knowledge and liking of the band. you had just appreciated his presence; his being there for you, his helping you film the concert.

at the end of the night, you had tired yourself out. your combat boots had begun to hurt your feet and toes mid-concert and your urge to remove them and walk home barefooted was very likely. fortunately for you, emile had offered to piggyback you all the way home. you had argued that you weigh heavier than three sacks of rice, to which emile retorted, "i don't care, babe, your feet could be bloody right now. get on my back and lemme just carry you home. we live twenty minutes away, don't be dogged. and let's be real, if mase was in my position, he would never offer to piggyback you home."

emile kept on insisting, so just to shut him up, you climbed on his back and you let him carry you all the way home. every now and then, you would remind him about your weight and that he'd be destroying his posture just by having you on his back. he didn't care about that, he cared about your discomfort. you hated that he always put you and your comfort before his, but nonetheless, you were grateful to have somebody like emile holding your hand in life and at concerts.

"we should do this again," you whispered in his ear sleepily as emile piggybacked you home. "going to concerts."

you felt emile's body vibrate as he chuckled. "i'd do anything with you, darlin'."

[mapsontheweb]

A mammoth cartographic compendium of African-American history.

Monumental and extremely rare maps of African-American history designed in the early 1970s for classroom use.

Published in Detroit in or around 1970, the maps are very much of the era, both recognizing the brutal reality of the forced emigration and enslavement of Africans and celebrating their eventual contributions to the culture, economy and politics of the United States.

The recto centers on a mammoth ethnographic map of Africa, using color coding to locate the lands of 16 “culture groups” and many subgroups, from Arabs and Berber in the North to Bantu and Khoisan in the South. Most are indigenous, though the “European” presence in South Africa is acknowledged. The culture groups cut across political boundaries throughout, perhaps a subtle dig at the attempts of colonial powers to impose a more Euro-centric form of order on the continent. Surrounding the map are pictorial and portrait vignettes, the latter featuring prominent African-Americans, including familiar faces such as Frederick Douglass and the late Martin Luther King, but also Matthew Henson, a member of Peary’s Arctic expedition and the first man to reach the North Pole. Above this are a small map of African “vegetation zones” and five small maps giving snapshots of the continent at different points in history.

[nolistra]

I wanna sell some unused Designs! Payment via Paypal and in Euro € Message me if interested in one! Terms of use:

You may do with em as you wish as long as you don't harm others

Please credit me

Don't resell the design for a higher price than you have bought it from me

You may change and redesign them as you like

Blonde Wolf Boy 30€ OPEN

Ginger Bilby Girl with Water Abilities 40€ OPEN

Sugar Glider with one arm 30€ OPEN

Arctic Fox Girl 40€ OPEN

Bloody Moth lady 20€ OPEN

Running Mouse with lightning ability 40€ OPEN

Jackal boy with flowers 30€ OPEN

Curly furred Cat 30€ OPEN

Hedgehog with a rose in his eye 40€ OPEN

[theageoftheunderstatement]

NME: Arctic Monkeys: “We know more tricks now, but we’re still rolling on that same instinct”

By Sophie Williams, 21/10/2022

From the outside of Suffolk’s Butley Priory, it sounds as though the ancient building is collapsing in on itself. Located within a secluded and rural pocket of southern England, it is the sanctuary of this converted 14th Century monastery that Arctic Monkeys have chosen to call home for a fortnight. Behind the stained glass windows, guitarist Jamie Cook is conjuring up a rousing squall, jiggling on the spot. His bandmates look on, eyes ablaze with excitement at the wall of noise unfolding before them.

It’s the middle of July 2021, and this is the Sheffield band’s final week at Butley Priory, where they’ve been working on ‘The Car’, their masterful seventh album. Prior to recording, the building had been part of the four-piece’s legend for some time: it’s where longtime producer James Ford – recognised amongst fans as ‘the fifth Arctic Monkey’ – celebrated his 40th birthday. Before they reunited here for the first time since lockdown, however, the band’s initial intention for the record was “to write louder songs than we had for some time,” says frontman Alex Turner, but quickly realised that this collection was evolving beyond a bedrock of heavy riffs. “I think what I found myself wanting to play when the band were around was actually very surprising to me,” he adds.

Every performance was recorded, with the results influencing what the band preserved, honed, and ultimately ditched. And for two weeks, the world outside of Arctic Monkeys’ temporary studio was well and truly banished. When the band – comprising Turner, Cook, bassist Nick O’Malley and Matt Helders on drums – were not walking around the wilds of the Suffolk countryside together, they shared pints and watched on as England’s journey at the pandemic-delayed Euro 2020 tournament played out. For a fortnight, time almost seemed meaningless. The gang were finally back together.

As Turner relays this story to NME, he’s about as far from that memory as you can get. We meet the frontman in an east London pub on a deceptively warm October afternoon a little over a year later, just as ‘The Car’’s release week is starting to kick off. Almost unbelievably, the band’s 2009 hit ‘Crying Lightning’ is playing quietly from the stereo downstairs, as if on cue. Considering that Turner is about to settle down for a drink – or, er, an English Breakfast tea – on the floor above, whoever is in charge of the playlist this lunchtime is blissfully unaware that they’ve managed to tempt fate. Turner looks too busy attending to his little china teapot to notice, anyway.

The group’s highly-anticipated reunion comes along with ‘The Car’, a 10-track collection that, in a five-star review, NME described as “a summary of the band’s story so far: sharp songwriting, relentless innovation and unbreakable teamwork.” Under the supervision of ensemble director Bridget Samuels [Midsommar, The Green Knight] at London’s RAK Studios, it’s the first album on which the band have worked with a full orchestra, allowing Turner’s voice – which sounds more brooding and malleable than it’s ever been – to pierce through a cinematic landscape of strings, piano motifs and low-slung bass rumbles.

Elegiac opener ‘There’d Better Be A Mirrorball’ immediately raises the stakes. A breakup tune that quietly anguishes over vanishing sensations of violin and harpsichord, the album’s lead single was the first to be demoed at Butley Priory. “And picture this: while recording, I’m running around with a 16mm camera that kind of kept me out of the way of everybody a little bit,” says Turner. He ultimately saved some of the footage for himself, and the rest was interspersed throughout the track’s understatedly retro video, making for a touching time capsule of that particular recording session.

Crucially, the new album – with the cover artwork shot by Helders – presents both a more cohesive and collaborative band than the one we heard on 2018’s divisive ‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino’. That record riffed on consumerism and technology with a burnished depth, but traded it’s wildly successful predecessor’s tsunami of bravado, riffs and hairgel – 2013’s multiple BRIT-winning ‘AM’ – for searching lounge-pop. Its writing credits reveal that most of the band were perhaps under-utilised as performers, given that O’Malley only appears on seven tracks, and Helders’ drumming is largely restrained.

‘The Car’’s daring centrepiece, ‘Body Paint’ flips the script entirely: you can practically hear Turner wink as he sings, “and if you’re thinking of me / I’m probably thinking of you”, before swirling atmospherics and O’Malley’s tumbling bass make way for a gale-force guitar solo from Cook. It’s the full-bodied sound of the Butley Priory trip, which was solely about having fun and bringing that feeling into the new record.

“We weren’t mentally ready to play stadiums up until now” – Alex Turner

By throwing themselves into new, more daring sounds, Arctic Monkeys have emerged fearless, Turner says decisively. “The records we’re making now are definitely different now to the ones we probably thought we would be making when we started out – actually, we didn’t think we’d be even making records anymore,” Turner says. “20 years ago, I didn’t envision ourselves going beyond…” He looks deep into his cup of tea as if searching for the rest of his answer, while taking an enormous pause from which you fear he may never return. “Well, the fact we gave ourselves the name ‘Arctic Monkeys’ alludes to the extent of ambitions we had.” He stops again. “Clearly hardly any.”

Yet Arctic Monkeys’ friendship has endured, in part, because the band have always known when to say no. They built a fanbase on the basis of a few early demos shared by fans through MySpace, and before the four-piece signed with the independent Domino Records – also home to Wet Leg and Hot Chip – they’d already made a pact to never agree to their music being used in advertising. They even turned down a then-coveted offer to appear on Top Of The Pops. Weeks later, their monstrous debut single ‘I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor’ stormed to the top of the UK Singles Chart instantly – no mean feat for a band without major record label cash or mountains of press on their side. They’d set a precedent to follow their own rules, and it had worked.

Stardom would soon prove to be inescapable, however: the band looked perpetually shellshocked when they broke out as unassuming teenagers with their enduring and now-seminal debut album, 2006’s ‘Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I��m Not’. “Somebody call 999, Richard Hawley’s been robbed!,” Turner famously joked, as the band, looking somewhere between a haze of drunkenness and feeling flustered, collected the Mercury Prize later that year. The following decade would see them evolve into the UK’s biggest, most culturally important band: they have gone on to headline Glastonbury twice, perform at the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony and, perhaps most importantly, have remained consistent, while their peers in sound have failed to keep similar longevity.

“When I think back to earlier times, I feel like we were just running on instinct, creative decisions included,” says Turner, with a gentle laugh. “I mean, like, first and foremost, we didn’t really know how to play our instruments at the start. But beyond that, I don’t really think that much within the band has changed a great deal; we might know a few more tricks, but we’re still rolling on that very same instinct.”

Dressed in a royal blue Lacoste jumper, Turner entertains NME for an hour with a boyish and mischievous charm; his few concessions to age include a formal, paisley-patterned silk scarf and some stubble. A gold link chain lays around his neck – a present from his grandfather that he’s worn everywhere since 2006 – and glints against the autumn sun. As he answers questions, Turner often leans back in his chair and starts re-enacting scenes, giving it some real gusto. No man this effortlessly funny is an accident – behind it all lies a bright, astute and often humorous songwriter.

Trying to discuss his lyrics – which, on ‘The Car’, are often uncharacteristically reflective – in the pub with Turner is a different matter, however, met mostly with some hesitant, yet endearing musings on personal growth. We briefly broach ‘Hello You’, which plays with high drama, and references Turner’s youth spent in north Sheffield – but like a big Hollywood production, what’s pizazz on camera is often pain behind the scenes. “I could pass for 17 if I just get a shave / And catch some Zzzs”, he sings at one point, only half-jokingly. “So much of this new music is scratching at the past and how much of it I should hang on to,” he says. “I think that song is pretty on the nose… as uncomfortable as that may be.”

It’s when describing ‘The Car’’s lushly arranged instrumental sections, however, that you can sense the cogs in Turner’s brain are starting to turn a little quicker. “Around the last album, the big story was like, ‘Wow, he’s got a piano’, which was true to an extent, but I wonder now looking at it, that it was this thing that I now do – recording ideas as you go – that got me going,” he says. His sudden excitement moves him to clench a trademark pair of black Ray Ban sunglasses so tightly in his hand, you fear there’s every chance they could suddenly snap.

Working on the album led to Arctic Monkeys scrapping their old rule that everything they recorded had to be playable live, opening up unseen possibilities. Turner experimented with the wah-wah guitar for both ‘Jet Skis On The Moat’ and the ridiculously funky ‘I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am’ – think ‘Station To Station’-era Bowie meets ELO – the latter being the moment “where everything clicked,” he affirms. Where a younger Arctic Monkeys would have raced through punky verses with lethal precision, ‘The Car’ marinates in the textures of upward sweeps and subtle, honeyed soul.

“I’m pretty happy with how ‘Tranquility Base..’ went down” – Alex Turner

As Turner speaks, it’s easy to picture the studio and imagine the Monkeys, once again, as teenagers in a garage: Turner the leader, Helders and O’Malley the jokers, Cook the near-silent but cunning sage – or, in Turner’s words: “Jamie remains the gatekeeper of the band, as it were.” These days, Cook is the brilliantly straight-faced foil – usually wearing a suit and sunglasses onstage, rocking gently from side to side as he churns out weighty riffs – to Turner’s loose, playful showman.

“I think that’s the key difference maybe with [‘The Car’] and the last record… perhaps we didn’t quite have a grasp of the dynamics of the bigger, newer sounds we were exploring,” he says. “But playing together live again certainly helped us to get there, and we developed a better awareness of each other. You find yourself in a different place when you take the songs to a new setting beyond where they were recorded.”

Even if ‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino’’s complete stylistic overhaul was curious enough to unsettle fans of the band’s louder, scrappier early days, Turner remains adamant that it was the right move for the group at the time. “I’m actually pretty happy with how it went down,” he says today. “We achieved something that we may not have been able to in the past. I think it definitely gave us the confidence to go to a different place on a record.”‘ The Car’’s ‘Sculptures Of Anything Goes’ – the band’s darkest song yet, a beast of distortion and weighty electronics – even nods to the public’s mixed response to ‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino’: “Puncturing your bubble of relatability with your horrible new sound”.

He alludes to how, despite ‘AM’ being the band’s most commercially popular album – having gone platinum in the US – with its West Coast rap-inspired cadences and bass-heavy melodies, it also felt like a bold revamp for Arctic Monkeys at the time of its release. “‘Do I Wanna Know?’ felt like a departure from everything that we had done before – and this was similar,” he says. “We had to almost acknowledge that our sound still had a little grease in its hair, and a bit of aggressiveness.”

“I don’t think much has changed within the band since the start” – Alex Turner

Turner says, however, that when Arctic Monkeys played the 26,000-capacity Foro Sol venue in Mexico City in March 2019 as one of the final shows on that tour, it felt like a “brilliant send-off” to what had been their most artistically challenging period. Backstage at that same show, Turner began to “sketch out” demos for ‘The Car’, with the idea that they “could close our shows.” He continues: “I found this footage of me playing a song backstage at that gig, and I thought, ‘I’m going to bottle the energy for the new record.’ It was raw, and full of downstrokes guitar.”

The songs from Foro Sol were eventually scrapped, but if anything, that night proved that the ‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino’ era had certainly unlocked a more lighthearted side to the band than we had seen in several years. Clips of Turner pretending to lose his train of thought as the twinkling keys of ‘One Point Perspective’ fade out – in tandem with the song’s final lyric – have since been memed into oblivion. It’s a simple, yet persistently effective act: each time, he looks suddenly blank, scratches his chin, and points absently in the air as though trying to remember something. “I don’t think it’s even a choice at this point. When that spotlight centres itself on me, I just can’t help myself,” he says.

Why did the routine start in the first place? Turner’s face curls into a convincing knot of embarrassment. “You know what? I ask myself the same question every 24 hours,” he responds.

In August, Arctic Monkeys formally introduced their new era by headlining Reading & Leeds for the third time in their career, and drew in one of the festival’s biggest crowds in the process. Capping off a remarkable summer of huge outdoor shows across Europe, the weekend proved that a new, young, wildly committed generation of Monkeys fans had come to the fore, many of whom arrived via TikTok or streaming services, partly due to the recent stratospheric success of ‘505’ – the first Monkeys track to fully showcase their emotional depth as performers.

Lifted from 2007’s ‘Favourite Worst Nightmare’ album, the surging indie-rock track has recently surpassed hits from Eminem and Coldplay, clocking in an average of 1.7 million plays a month on Spotify alone. The stats are even more impressive when you consider that the band have actively chosen to shun social media throughout their career – it’s almost as though they can’t help gaining worldwide attention.

For Turner, seeing audiences continue to react passionately to encore closer ‘505’ has been “genuinely moving”, but he’s bemused by the revival that has come around in the first place. “Without having ‘505’ at the end of our shows for a few years around 2008, I’m not sure if it would have found the new life it has now,” he says. “I hope that doesn’t sound like I’m taking credit [for the revival] – even if it wasn’t totally unexpected, the attention around [‘505’] is really quite special.”

“The renewed attention around ‘505’ is really quite special” – Alex Turner

Arctic Monkeys’ recent live performances have also seen them bring out rarities from their back catalogue, including a moodier rendition of ‘Humbug’ standout ‘Potion Approaching’, and ‘That’s Where You’re Wrong’, a fuzzed-out singalong from the unfairly overlooked ‘Suck It And See’ era. Switching up the setlist has made the band appreciate what they’ve achieved up to this point, Turner explains: “There’s quite a lot of room now for us to unlock songs and these other little things from the past,” he says. “I have almost, like, a PDF in my mind of what we could work on.” His eyebrow arches in confusion. “Wait, it wouldn’t be a PDF, would it? I think I meant to say a spreadsheet…”

It’s this endearing playfulness and intimacy to Turner that makes his disbelief at Arctic Monkeys’ current stature, 20 years into their career, seem genuine. Next summer, they’ll play a full stadium tour across the UK for the first time ever in their career, including two huge hometown shows in Sheffield at Hillsborough Park. Better still, there’s a Glasto-shaped hole in the touring schedule, too.

The scale of these shows is already toying with Turner: “It wouldn’t have made sense for us to play stadiums before this album, and I don’t think we were mentally ready for it up until now,” he says. “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 says that they won’t be taking a string section on the forthcoming tour; instead, the band will be assisted by extra keys and synth. Turner is confident that the new album will translate live, and goes on to liken the rich emotional depth across ‘The Car’ to the searing, heart-raising two-minute guitar breakdown that wraps up ‘A Certain Romance’, the crowning achievement from their debut album. “I remember when we were recording ‘A Certain Romance’ and having a conversation with the producer about the final guitar solo,” he says. “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.”

Are you still proud of that song?

“Yeah,” he replies immediately. “If anything, for the fact that [‘A Certain Romance’] showed that we did actually have these ambitions beyond what we once thought we were capable of. Back then, we would struggle with the idea of adding anything more to the songs; but here, there’s some guitar that goes high, and then comes back in.”

“‘A Certain Romance’ showed ambition beyond what we thought we were capable of” – Alex Turner

Across the table, he begins to play the air guitar, gleefully wriggling around in his seat. For a moment, it’s as though Turner appears spookily untouched by time: eyes bright, wide, and inquisitive; a flash of youthful, riotous joy writ large across his face. He continues: “When we recorded [‘A Certain Romance’] we were all like, ‘Woah, woah, woah…” He raises his hands above his head once more. “‘What have we done here?’ Pushing the music that far out from what we’d done before initially felt contentious, to say the least.’”

Turner looks happy, calm and content, and he should be – he’s still goofing around on the world’s biggest stages, still making music with his childhood best friends, and caring less about critical reception and more about enjoying himself. ‘The Car’ may see Arctic Monkeys traverse a far greater distance from their zippy indie beginnings than ever before, but there are no regrets, Turner says, before trailing off into another warm anecdote from the time the band spent at Butley Priory.

“The excitement and energy of everybody being together, sharing ideas in the same room, was quite powerful,” Turner says, briefly moving his gaze to the table below. “I noticed that, for instance, when I think about how it felt saying goodbye at the end of that session…” He catches himself, and looks faintly misty-eyed – though he’d never let us see that properly.

Turner turns to face us once more. “It’s just… you know, the air totally changes when the rest of the band leave. I don’t quite know what to call it, but I do know that being around them is how to get that magic – and I haven’t ever found it anywhere else,” he says, with a knowing smile.

[arinewman7]

WTF is wrong with these idiots attacking art to make their case about climate change, ffs? They superglued their hands to the frame of a painting by Raphael. How is that going to raise awareness about climate change? Who wakes up and thinks, “Today I will glue myself to the frame of a Raphael painting so the world will know I am angry about climate change?” Huh. Maybe if I superglue their mouth and nostrils shut…

*

Sorry…I had to curb my anger about these climate change peeps that keep attacking art/art museums. It honestly shows that they are simply idiots who have no balls: attacking art? They threaten to destroy art bc not enough is being done for their idea of climate change? All of us on Earth are victims and it’s well beyond our control. The ocean waters off of southern Florida are almost 100 degrees. Greenland is pretty melty. The arctic ice shelves are caving. Earthlings still use fossil fuels. Plastic is everywhere…including amniotic sacs. So, how is attacking art going to help us progress toward tackling looming climate change? Actions speak louder than words and these people’s actions tell me that they are complete morons. Certainly there is a better way to engage people and heighten awareness.

[hadrianandantinuous]

Scrimshaw: The Folk Art of the Western Sailor

There is nothing more synonymous or representative of whaling in America and Europe than scrimshaw.  Scrimshaw is the practice carving or engraving of pictures onto whale bone, teeth, and baleen most prevalently.  They are windows into the daily lives and wants of Western seamen, as well as faithful depictions of whaling vessels done by the sailors’ own hands.  This essay will delve into the materials and manufacture of these items, and what they can reveal about the men they were created by.  The focus will primarily be on American-made art, though among Western cultures there is not considerable variation in the production of scrimshaw.  Instead, the stylistic variation of the art form is due more to the skills and materials available to whalers, a further reflection of their social standing and the cultural contact on board sailing vessels.  Through analysis of the motifs, materials, and complexity, the historical archaeologist can learn invaluable information about the whaling industry and the lives of sailors.

While the usage of whale bones and the bones of other marine mammals for art has a deep and extensive history, the specific kind of bone carving that became synonymous with classic scrimshaw emerged uniquely from the tradition of whaling in the Western world beginning in the 17th century.  Among Western traditions, scrimshaw had European precursors, notably early medieval Viking carvings and 11th- and 12th-century votive carvings in European monasteries.  The more modern version of scrimshaw was influenced by other bone carving traditions indigenous to both Europe and the Americas but has its own distinct style and hallmarks.  The primary distinction is the difference in the relationship depicted between the hunter and the prey whose body is used as the art medium.  As author Michael Dyer of “Scrimshaw” explains, Indigenous Arctic people have always had a closer relationship to the animals they hunted, having depended on them for food and subsistence.  The Western whaler did not have that same connection to the whale they were hunting, “theirs being a purely commercial enterprise.”  Their carving styles are more akin to a “trophy” of the animal, instead of an homage. 

Figure 1: Busk carved and engraved by whaling master Alden Sears (1739–1803), American, sperm whale skeletal bone, 1766. New Bedford Whaling Museum, 2001.100.648.

The art focused on in this report will follow the Western, Euro- and American-descended traditions of scrimshaw from the 18th to the 19th centuries.  The majority of knowledge about scrimshaw comes from American collections.  Very little research has been done by other countries, even those with sizable collections. The Western practice of both carving and engraving pictures and scenes onto whale bone emerged among whalemen in the late colonial era, maturing in the 1820s and ‘30s.  Sailors onboard whaling vessels were allowed to take the “hard byproducts” from the whales they processed, since they had little to no commercial value.  These byproducts included sperm whale teeth, ivory from both whales and walruses, skeletal whale bone, and baleen.  The earliest dated example of a carved sperm whale tooth comes from a British whaleship named Adam, the piece is dated to 1817.  Alternatively, the first known American example of scrimshaw was a carved busk made from whale panbone and dated to 1766.  This panbone busk would begin a long and diverse era of American art.

All a whaler required in order to make his own scrimshaw was a piece of whalebone, a sharp sail needle or other cutting implement, sandpaper, a blackening agent, and time.  The blackening agent mostly used was lampblack, easily found in the oil lamps or the tryworks onboard.  Other colored pigments could also be used, but they were harder to come across; mainly consisting of verdigris, handmade fruit and vegetable dyes, and ink bought from Asia.  The process for engraving begins with the polishing of the bone with sandpaper in preparation for carving.  After a design is drawn onto the bone, it is engraved with a needle or knife, and the black or colored pigments are “applied to the lines or dots and wiped away.”  The bone is then polished a second time to remove any excess pigments and to reveal the design.  Differently colored sealing wax could also be used to highlight certain elements, such as thinly scored lines.

Figure 2: Engraved sperm whale tooth by Frederick Myrick in 1829, depicting the American ship the Susan as well as an eagle and shield. Nantucket Historical Association, 1918.0015.001.

Scrimshaw is regarded by many as the folk art of the whaleman.  As opposed to many other kinds of sailors, whalers had a lot of downtime on whaling voyages.  After the Napoleonic Wars, the American whaling industry rose to prominence and reached its peak in the 1820s.  The prevalence of whaling also logically coincided with the peak of scrimshaw production.  This was due to “longer voyages, larger crews, and over-manned ships,” not to mention the abundant bounties of whales they were processing, creating the perfect conditions for plentiful scrimshaw production.  When not actively working, the one thing the whaler had in abundance was time.

During the height of the whaling industry, the average voyage was three years long.  When they were not busy chasing or processing a whale, they were allowed leisure time to follow creative pursuits.  Carving scrimshaw was one way to escape the boredom of the open ocean.  The artistic pursuit of these engravings also reaffirmed a collective identity onboard a whaling vessel.  As the art form was unique to the occupation, it was taught by and to other sailors.  This is seen in the subjects mostly depicted in scrimshaw, as they are maritime in nature, many artists depicting the ship they were currently working on.  For many, “the act of creation built and reaffirmed their shared seafaring identity, transferring skills gained through work into the creation of art and they shared ideas with each other about the art that they made.”  It was a way to connect to other sailors as well as a way to connect back to the home they had left behind. 

Figure 3: Anonymous engraved sperm whale skeletal bone, depicting a whaling scene, circa 1840s. New Bedford Whaling Museum, 2001.100.1067.

Though made during leisure hours, scrimshaw could be decorative or practical, and they often were both.  Many whalers carved tools such as bodkins, seam rubbers, serving mallets, and others.  With a mind on their home, some made gifts for family members, such as “massive numbers of yarn-winders, pie crimpers, hair pins, and work boxes.”  A common gift for female family members or sweethearts was a busk for a corset made from panbone or baleen.  The busks were commonly decorated with domestic scenes of life back on land, as well as natural designs, ships, and sometimes whales and scenes of whaling.  Though they would be removed from larger society for years at a time, whalers still tried to keep up with the trends and their peers back home.

Figure 4: Anonymous swift, American, sperm whale ivory, sperm whale skeletal bone, baleen, tortoise shell, cloth, nonferrous metal fastenings, circa 1840s. New Bedford Whaling Museum, 2001.100.684.

In the middle of the 19th century, canes became incredibly fashionable masculine symbols, and sailors of all ranks tried their hand at making them.  They applied their skills at carving toward stylistic handles depicting varied subjects of ranging complexity.  A common motif appearing on the ends of canes was a clenched fist, which was “a common design in folk art, representing frustration, resistance, or solidarity.”  This could be revealing about a sailor’s sentiment toward his lot in life on board the ship, as there were large disparities between the common sailor and those in positions of power, even in the types of scimshaw they were able to create.

One of the forms of scrimshaw that was less accessible to the average sailor was the complex construction that went into making a swift or yarn winder.  They were made up of thin, carefully riveted pieces of panbone that can collapse or expand as a whole.  Because of their architectural complexity and relative size, most sailors would not have had the materials or space to make one themselves, and the only swifts made onboard were generally done by the ship’s captain.  Other complicated and beautiful scrimshaw objects include watch hutches and birdcages, not to mention the skill that went into carving a small pie crimper, which was a relatively common scrimshaw item.

Figure 5: Anonymous engraved sperm whale tooth, depicting a woman wearing a fashionable dress and holding a book.  Nantucket Historical Association, 1925.0007.004a

The subject or theme of many engraved teeth and panbones “was of a nautical theme, depicting harbor scenes, great battles at sea, or men and ships in pursuit of the mighty whale.”  In addition to artworks depicting their daily lives, there were those that longed for the home they had left behind.  Mostly those included depictions of sweethearts or family they had left behind on land.  Whalers “carved toothpicks, whistles, and pipe-tampers in the shape of female legs, and they etched and sketched figures of women half-clothed.”  However, most surviving scrimshaw depict the whaling ships themselves, or scenes from the whalers’ daily lives. 

While the art of scrimshaw was mostly limited to Western whalers, the style was inspired and influenced by many cultures within and touched by the Western world.  As previously mentioned, they drew heavily from previous techniques of bone carving from Northern Europe.  They were further inspired by other cultural influences during the peak of the whaling industry.  Cultural contact between American whalers and Inuit people in the Western Arctic resulted in altered styles among both groups.  For example, some American scrimshanders began making detailed carvings on traded walrus tusks, and Inuit carvers began making cribbage boards using both traditional Arctic carving methods as well as the newer Western forms to sell them as souvenirs to Western visitors.  Traditionally, Indigenous Arctic art was easy to tell apart from Western scrimshaw due to the motifs and scenes depicted, until the allure of selling to Western buyers forced them to change their style.  However, relief carvings made from bone and ivory are rarely seen in the Western tradition. In addition to their Arctic counterparts, American whalers were influenced by many other cultures they encountered.

Figure 6: Anonymous carved walrus tusk, circa 19th century.  Depicts two walruses and a sled pulled by dogs.  Nantucket Historical Association, 1961.0033.001.

Whaling vessels were incredibly diverse places, including Americans from different backgrounds such as African American seamen, as well as plentiful Portuguese from the islands of Cape Verde and the Azores.  Whaling crews would also take on sailors from ports they visited in other European, Latin American, and Pacific ports, with Pacific Islanders contributing greatly to the American whaling industry.  This is mostly due to whaling vessels taking on replacements in Pacific waters for American sailors who had deserted while on “liberty,” or leave, in port.  Pacific Islanders were also attractive to whaling captains because they could be paid less, and they “had reputations among American captains for bravery and boat skills.”  Many of these men, both poor White sailors, and many of the non-White sailors, could not read nor write, eliminating them from the written record of history.  They could, however, carve and create art that still exists today in the form of scrimshaw. 

Evidence of this cultural sharing with Pacific Islanders is exemplified most by the addition of carved coconut shells to the American whalers’ repertoire.  Coconut shell objects were traditionally produced in many different forms throughout Oceania, parts of Africa, and in many areas in the Indian Ocean.  The favored form among American sailors were coconut-shell dippers and spoons, with handles fashioned from typical scrimshandering materials.  Unfortunately, this impactful art form was harvested from finite materials and eventually had to come to an end.

The whaling industry was brought to a rapid end by the discovery of “rock oil” in the ground, which rapidly replaced the need for whaleships and whalemen.  The declining whale population and the American Civil War also exacerbated the death of the industry.  The few remaining whalers were raided heavily by Confederate Naval ships during the Civil War and made most whaling ventures incredibly unprofitable and undesirable.  Along with the eventual demise of whaling led to the cessation of any scrimshaw made from whale products.  Author John Erickson of “Scrimshaw” argues that the tradition of scrimshaw lived on in the Americas through the engraving of powder horns, as they use similar techniques, but do not depict any of the hallmark nautical imagery that is typical of whaling scrimshaw.  Despite limited opportunities, the traditional maritime form of scrimshaw did continue, though at a much more reserved rate during the 20th century.

However limited, there are still parts of the world that continue to hunt whales, whether legal or not.  Thus, it follows that there are still versions of scrimshaw that are practiced today as well.  In the past 30 years, the traditional folk art of scrimshaw has had a surge in popularity, and with many authentic examples being housed in private or public collections, fakes and reproductions are rampant.  Many use authentic materials, even going as far as recreating traditional styles to create “authentic” scrimshaw to fool buyers.  Others use synthetic materials to mass-produce these artifacts, which are called “fakeshaw” by experts.  These fakes have the potential to disrupt the historical record, as many include fake names and dates.  Since the carvings were often made by regular seamen, they create a snapshot into the lives of ordinary men living in the Western world, including their desires and priorities. 

Figure 7: Anonymous sperm whale tooth engraving depicting two ships battling at sea.  Nantucket Historical Association, 1962.0035.005.

Scrimshaw can provide the archaeologist and history with invaluable information such as information about the names and even locations of some whaling vessels.  If dated and signed, several works by the same artist could create a clear picture of a voyage or sailing route.  Additionally, many works of scrimshaw include accurate depictions of their ships, so accurate that “some can be identified by the rig, hull design and type of boats as naval vessels or whaleships.”  Images of flags on the ships can also point to nationality, and other details can possibly point to a relative date, though that is much harder for the researcher to be certain of.  While scrimshaw is unlikely to survive a shipwreck, it can still offer the historian valuable information about whaling voyages.

 By analyzing the motifs, materials, and complexity of scrimshaw artifacts, details of the whaling industry and whalemen themselves can be illuminated.  The themes depicted in this folk art reveal sentiments sailors held about their lives, profession, and even those they had left behind.  The manufacture of the scrimshaw can reveal the materials and tools made available to the seaman and what skills he had picked up from his fellow sailor.  Overall, the art and skill of scrimshaw is more than symbolically representative of the whaling industry, as they are physical records of the men who lived and worked on these vessels.

Works cited:

Creighton, Margaret S. Rights and Passages: The Experience of American Whaling, 1830-1870. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Dyer, Michael P. "Scrimshaw." Academic Press, (2018): 841-845. https://www-sciencedirect-com.uri.idm.oclc.org/science/article/pii/B9780128043271000170.

Erickson, John. "Scrimshaw." Westview 16, no. 1 (November 1996): 36-39. https://dc.swosu.edu/westview/vol16/iss1/13?utm_source=dc.swosu.edu%2Fwestview%2Fvol16%2Fiss1%2F13&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages.

Luecke, Mirelle. "Exploring the Sea as Studio: The Importance of Labor and Leisure in Sailor Folk Art." The Journal of Modern Craft 14, no. 1 (2021): 57-71. https://doi.org/10.1080/17496772.2021.1912268.

New Bedford Whaling Museum. “Art and Literature: Overview of Scrimshaw.” Accessed Mar 24, 2024. https://www.whalingmuseum.org/learn/research-topics/whaling-history/art-and-literature/.

New Bedford Whaling Museum. “Scrimshaw: Scrimshaw Gallery.” Accessed Mar 24, 2024. https://www.whalingmuseum.org/exhibition/scrimshaw/#pp-toc-6109979c2c807-anchor-0.

West, Janet. “Scrimshaw and the Identification of Sea Mammal Products.” Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 2 (1991): 39–79. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40795035.

[beardedmrbean]

Helsingin Sanomat covered Vice-President of the European Commission for Values and Transparency Vera Jourova's visit to Finland this past week, where she lauded the country's recent presidential elections.

Jourova warned of likely Russian interference ahead of the upcoming European parliamentary elections.

"In the current digital media age, online harassment is constant, it just gets more intense before elections," Jourova said in an interview with HS.

Jourova gave Finland credit for its recent presidential elections, where no significant electoral fraud was detected, although it was anticipated.

"Finland is a special case for me, a kind of miracle. An important factor in your presidential elections was that the candidates themselves ran a civilised and honest campaign," said Jourova.

Jourova also pointed to Finland identifying disinformation better than many other European countries, thanks to education, media literacy and a long-standing commitment by society as a whole.

"You have immunity, but I have heard from Finns here in Helsinki that it is not taken for granted. You have to work for it too," Jourova said.

Researcher warns of escalating border situation

International crisis management expert Timo Hellenberg told tabloid Iltalehti that the situation on Finland's eastern border could become more tense this spring, adding that the possibility of armed clashes could not be entirely ruled out.

"It is quite possible that attempts will be made to test and violate [Finland's] sovereignty on the border. I see no reason why this couldn't happen," the PhD told IL.

Last year, Finland faced instrumentalised migration on its border with Russia. Hellenberg noted that this was just one possible way Russia could try to interfere with Finland's sovereignty.

"Finland should continue to take a firm line on border control and also be prepared for the possibility that border security will be affected through various means, which may be unprecedented," Hellenberg told the paper.

He said there are many people in Russia who could be involved in an armed confrontation.

"A strict analysis of whether it is little green men or Russian intelligence agencies or purely representatives of organised crime is, in my opinion, secondary. The focus should be on what their target is and, above all, on how to respond to it," Hellenberg noted.

A recent article from The Telegraph revealed Russian intelligence documents which plan to use paramilitary forces in Africa to guide migrants to Europe.

Hellenberg also cited organised criminal organisations under the direction of Russia operating in Poland to transport migrants, adding that a similar phenomenon could occur in Finland.

Finland's Sin City?

Tabloid Ilta-Sanomat made the bold claim that the ski resort of Levi in northern Lapland, is Finland's Las Vegas.

While Levi lacks a world-renowned gambling industry, a surplus of Elvis impersonators, or any of the other iconic accoutrements in Sin City, local bartenders claimed that the resort makes up for that with a similar nightlife ethos.

"What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. It's the same mentality with a lot of the crowd here. What happens in Levi, stays in Levi," local nightclub owner Ville Lehtonen told IS.

Levi is in the municipality of Kittilä in northern Lapland, which has just under 7,000 year-round residents. The resort lies about 170 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle — quite the contrast from Las Vegas in the arid southwestern US.

IS went deep into the Levi nightlife scene with Lehtonen and his business partner Johannes Pärnä. They said that, by Arctic standards, Levi is relatively cheap and Norwegians don't even blink at 10 euro drinks, which brings them in droves to party in the northern Finnish resort. In addition to Finns and Norwegians, Levi also has many tourists from the UK and Germany.

Levi's nightlife gets most lively in the run-up to May Day.

"Here, the word nightlife means all day in spring. Spring is one long night until almost May Day," Lehtonen said.

The nightclub owners pointed out that many of the tourists who come to Levi during March don't even bring skis with them, their main objective is to party.

[xeneric-shrooms]

Please, what is the high end plush brand? I was to stare longingly at the $110 racoon

YEAHHH let me go get Alfred :]

He sits nestled with my other guys

The brand is Hansa Creation! The plushes come with a little catalogue booklet of all their other collections

They don't just make small stuffed animals, there's a 150cm standing (upright) grizzly bear, a 230cm standing reindeer, a 125cm laying grey wolf, 150cm standing horse, 135cm standing saint bernard, A 370CM GIRAFFE AND A 330CM AFRICAN BULL ELEPHANT. And so many more.

(they also do marine animals and! Dinosaurs!)

They do domestic animals like dogs and cats too! And their animals are all life like (my dog Did Not like Alfred when I first got him)

I'll list all the animal collections that's listed in the booklet ↓↓↓

Euro-American

Domestic & Farm

Australian

African

Arctic

Jurassic

Marine

Rainforest

Puppets and also animatronics

[flannelfoxen]

Current f.oxes and yotes for sale! 3/17/23

F.oxes from left to right: Ranched Dakota gold, pearl, L/S silver, L/S fire&ice, and a red. Wild L/S NA red, 4 euro red, arctic, and gray.

Yotes from left to right: blonde, L/S black, L/S AK, L/S red, L/S red leg, hybrid, brown, red, L/S brown.

I just sold 3/4 of my t.anukis and my fav black yote pelt. I do have other species available but I love the variation on these guys!

My favs from these are the silver with white feet, beautiful fire&ice, super soft right euro, blonde coy, super fluffy AK, and all the colors on the red leg one!

I have a store page now! Which means I can send coupons!

FOXENTUMBLR15

[ihopeyoubothstaysafefromharm]

the soft animal of your body

this is extremely niche but i recently rewatched okja and i wanted to read something about jay, just jay, being by himself. be kind to the soft animal of your body. i realize that this isn't even a thing that has a fandom and that exactly no one except me is actually expecting to see this right now but i just wanted to make something nice for this character because i think he deserves it

Also on A03

Jay only owns two suits. It’s not out of some ascetic self-sacrificing practice - the ALF just requires them to carry around so much gear and so many highly specialized single purpose garments and disguises that it's simply more practical this way. He always gets the suits dry cleaned, by whatever mom-and-pop establishment he can find in whatever city he's in - but the shirts he washes by himself. And so it's Saturday night and Jay is at a laundromat in Evora, Portugal. Self-service, eight Euro for a small load of laundry and he's completely by himself. There's a bright, happy decal with instructions and rules over the wall of washers and dryers. There's a stack of reusable plastic bins by his feet. He briefly considers turning them upside down and resting his feet on them, but even in the quiet empty space, it feels rude, tap tap.

It's not some great mystery like others might think. He's not secretly rich, he doesn't think he's some Bruce Wayne type hero - he finds those films revolting anyway, all that senseless carnage, although he's grateful for the people who make them and hopes all their families are well, tap tap. Jay wears a suit because he’s a delegate of mankind, in his work, and it only feels right to show up looking the part. It’s not that he’s ever found people in suits particularly comforting - his father never wore one, Jay may not have even owned one when he was small, but something about it felt right. Other people trusted men in suits, maybe not in their heart of hearts but in some learned, practiced way, like how people force themselves to like beer or go kayaking. There was a learned component to humanity that had nothing to do with being human, Jay’s always thought, and it’s shocking how much of the world that component governs. So when Jay shows up at Swiss banks and NATO meetings and makes his way through private facilities, no one bats an eye. But when he shows up in small villages, in ravaged cities where the source of suffering can clearly be traced to someone at a very real and solid desk, he sees the people he encounters fight actively against their nature through to the schema in their brain that tells them to trust his tie and his cufflinks and his shiny, polished shoes. It makes him sick, sometimes, not because of their initial disgust, but because of how them fighting against it might be used by someone other than him.

All the buildings in this little town are yellow or white. Jay likes colourful things, he finds them more soothing than neutrals with a pop of something bright. For as long as he could remember, color in an otherwise dull space has seemed like danger - a patch of blood on the arctic snow-bed, the black void of an oil slick on a shining sea. The air in the laundromat smells floral with a hint of mildew. He uncrosses his ankles and stands up, hovers in the narrow space between the plastic chair and the washing machine. Jay doesn’t carry a watch, that always seemed like a nasty habit. The washing machine beeps and its steel door swings open. He transfers the wet shirts to the dryer and retrieves more coins from the little dispenser built into the wall. The drying is his favorite part.

Jay's favorite sensation when he was a child was burying his face in the crook of his mother's arm, nose and eyelids pressed right into the bend of her elbow. It was the only time he remembered he was a mammal. There is something about softness that is intrinsically mammalian, the quickest path back to baseline. So much of the world, it seemed to Jay, was the opposite of soft - its problems, its rules and, most tragically, its solutions. See, after a long and sunny early childhood, something suddenly happened inside Jay, a switch flipped or a valve tightened and out of nowhere, he was constantly upset. He couldn't sleep through the night alone, he couldn't get through a school day without calling home. It felt like some innate sense of safety had been entirely extracted from him. His father would nap peacefully on the couch and Jay would stand there and make sure that he was breathing. He would redraw all possible routes home in his mind. He would double knot his shoe strings and keep food stashed by his bed. For the first few months, he was met with sweet understanding and concern, at least at home. He was allowed to sleep in his parents' bedrooms, in each of their beds whenever he liked, or on in a pinch could ask one of them to sleep on the cot by his bed, pinky fingers linked in the crevasse between them, all monsters be damned. When he slept with his mom she would hold him tight and he would press his face into the soft skin of her arm and somehow that ever present dread would completely dissolve. But in the morning the feeling would return, and it gradually became unbecoming for a nine year old boy to do the things they'd agreed to let him do. They took him to bleak waiting rooms to talk privately with kind but detached strangers, who later prescribed pills to be taken daily. He didn’t like swallowing them, couldn’t do it without throwing his head back like a lion.

Jay doesn’t bring his iPad with him when he’s not on a mission. To avoid being tracked, the ALF don’t carry phones - they just have pre-arranged meeting spots and safe houses and there’s no need to keep tabs on anyone. That’s the beauty of doing something out of love and honor, you don’t have to worry about people slacking on the job. Evora is famous for its university and its slaughterhouses. It’s a warm autumn evening and every so often, a giggling group of students dressed in formal robes runs past, presumably on their way to some odd social function. Earlier outside the city walls, while they were scoping out the entry points into the main meatpacking plant, Jay saw a group of those oddly dressed students shouting at a group of young people in their underwear in a park. One by one, the under-dressed students would drop to the soft, damp ground, face first, while loud, jaunty music played from some tinny cell-phone speaker nearby. It was odd, but no one seemed to be distressed - under their serious facade, there was an energy to both those hazing and those being hazed that seemed like they were enjoying themselves. Thinking back on it now, it seems to Jay that it might be because neither party was really on the opposite side of each other - perhaps the ones in uniform had had that done to them before, perhaps the new ones would have the chance to do it to someone down the line. Power never really was a ladder, it’s almost always a cycle, things always revert to their true form in the end. Jay crosses his ankles neatly and studies the lint collected at the edge of the wall. It probably had microorganisms living in it, fruitful in the warm damp heat. Maybe they’re friends with the mold. Tap tap.

Despite their rounded edges, the pills they’d prescribed him did not feel like a soft solution. At least, no more than a heartfelt conversation that involved only one heart being bared. He was grateful, of course, because the care and kindness of his parents and teachers and doctors led them to want to solve this constant feeling that he had inside, but it didn't seem like anyone was actually hearing him - or worse, that they were, but that there was nothing anyone could do about it. That a feeling could never be un-felt, a seed un-planted without damage. As the years went on, the feeling settled and clarified from a general sense of dread into something specific, something sharp that pierced right through Jay's soft mammalian heart: pain, like a search light sweeping over the world. The whole world was in pain. And Jay, like a radio locked into a frequency, could feel it from all sides rushing right into his chest.

Beep beep. The sound of the dryer coming to a stop doesn’t echo in the small room, it seems to get sucked into the wall. Jay once heard a physicist say that no sound is ever truly gone. He punctuated this statement with a clap that swirled and echoed all around them. The particles that move to produce the sound we hear, the man said, would reverberate for as long as there was space and time, growing more silent but never truly fading. That’s how we know the past happened. It made Jay feel like he was floating. Beep beep. Jay opens the dryer, the warm air and puff of industrial strength detergent rushing out to greet him like a friend. He reaches in, touches the warm bundle of fabric. He has to shake the shirts out soon, to prevent them creasing. Looking put together is part of the facade. The white shirt seems so stark against his hands in the dark drum of the dryer, but there’s color there too, from the little blue shadows in the wrinkles to the warm light bouncing off the window from the street. In a few hours they’re going to load 500 Alentejano pigs onto trucks and sneak them out under the cover of night. He didn’t get to meet them earlier, but he could hear them through the wall of the tunnel they had found leading to the sty. He picks up the soft fabric, glances out the window.  The light flickers for a millisecond and it’s either the power or his iron deficiency. His breath hitches, just for a moment, but he's steady on his feet. He can hear cars in the distance, heavy trucks on the highway and people going somewhere far or near or nowhere in particular at all. 

Then he lifts up the shirt and buries his face in it. It's soft and for a moment, he doesn't hear anything at all.

[alexturne]

Arctic Monkeys: “We know more tricks now, but we’re still rolling on that same instinct” (NME feature)

After a glorious, but divisive, sonic shift, the Sheffield band double down with their lush new album ‘The Car’, proof that they’re ready to follow wherever the road takes them.

By Sophie Williams, 21st October 2022

From the outside of Suffolk’s Butley Priory, it sounds as though the ancient building is collapsing in on itself. Located within a secluded and rural pocket of southern England, it is the sanctuary of this converted 14th Century monastery that Arctic Monkeys have chosen to call home for a fortnight. Behind the stained glass windows, guitarist Jamie Cook is conjuring up a rousing squall, jiggling on the spot. His bandmates look on, eyes ablaze with excitement at the wall of noise unfolding before them.

It’s the middle of July 2021, and this is the Sheffield band’s final week at Butley Priory, where they’ve been working on ‘The Car’, their masterful seventh album. Prior to recording, the building had been part of the four-piece’s legend for some time: it’s where longtime producer James Ford – recognised amongst fans as ‘the fifth Arctic Monkey’ – celebrated his 40th birthday. Before they reunited here for the first time since lockdown, however, the band’s initial intention for the record was “to write louder songs than we had for some time,” says frontman Alex Turner, but quickly realised that this collection was evolving beyond a bedrock of heavy riffs. “I think what I found myself wanting to play when the band were around was actually very surprising to me,” he adds.

Every performance was recorded, with the results influencing what the band preserved, honed, and ultimately ditched. And for two weeks, the world outside of Arctic Monkeys’ temporary studio was well and truly banished. When the band – comprising Turner, Cook, bassist Nick O’Malley and Matt Helders on drums – were not walking around the wilds of the Suffolk countryside together, they shared pints and watched on as England’s journey at the pandemic-delayed Euro 2020 tournament played out. For a fortnight, time almost seemed meaningless. The gang were finally back together.

As Turner relays this story to NME, he’s about as far from that memory as you can get. We meet the frontman in an east London pub on a deceptively warm October afternoon a little over a year later, just as ‘The Car’’s release week is starting to kick off. Almost unbelievably, the band’s 2009 hit ‘Crying Lightning’ is playing quietly from the stereo downstairs, as if on cue. Considering that Turner is about to settle down for a drink – or, er, an English Breakfast tea – on the floor above, whoever is in charge of the playlist this lunchtime is blissfully unaware that they’ve managed to tempt fate. Turner looks too busy attending to his little china teapot to notice, anyway.

The group’s highly-anticipated reunion comes along with ‘The Car’, a 10-track collection that, in a five-star review, NME described as “a summary of the band’s story so far: sharp songwriting, relentless innovation and unbreakable teamwork.” Under the supervision of ensemble director Bridget Samuels [Midsommar, The Green Knight] at London’s RAK Studios, it’s the first album on which the band have worked with a full orchestra, allowing Turner’s voice – which sounds more brooding and malleable than it’s ever been – to pierce through a cinematic landscape of strings, piano motifs and low-slung bass rumbles.

Elegiac opener ‘There’d Better Be A Mirrorball’ immediately raises the stakes. A breakup tune that quietly anguishes over vanishing sensations of violin and harpsichord, the album’s lead single was the first to be demoed at Butley Priory. “And picture this: while recording, I’m running around with a 16mm camera that kind of kept me out of the way of everybody a little bit,” says Turner. He ultimately saved some of the footage for himself, and the rest was interspersed throughout the track’s understatedly retro video, making for a touching time capsule of that particular recording session.

Crucially, the new album – with the cover artwork shot by Helders – presents both a more cohesive and collaborative band than the one we heard on 2018’s divisive ‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino’. That record riffed on consumerism and technology with a burnished depth, but traded it’s wildly successful predecessor’s tsunami of bravado, riffs and hairgel – 2013’s multiple BRIT-winning ‘AM’ – for searching lounge-pop. Its writing credits reveal that most of the band were perhaps under-utilised as performers, given that O’Malley only appears on seven tracks, and Helders’ drumming is largely restrained.

‘The Car’’s daring centrepiece, ‘Body Paint’ flips the script entirely: you can practically hear Turner wink as he sings, “and if you’re thinking of me / I’m probably thinking of you”, before swirling atmospherics and O’Malley’s tumbling bass make way for a gale-force guitar solo from Cook. It’s the full-bodied sound of the Butley Priory trip, which was solely about having fun and bringing that feeling into the new record.

By throwing themselves into new, more daring sounds, Arctic Monkeys have emerged fearless, Turner says decisively. “The records we’re making now are definitely different now to the ones we probably thought we would be making when we started out – actually, we didn’t think we’d be even making records anymore,” Turner says. “20 years ago, I didn’t envision ourselves going beyond…” He looks deep into his cup of tea as if searching for the rest of his answer, while taking an enormous pause from which you fear he may never return. “Well, the fact we gave ourselves the name ‘Arctic Monkeys’ alludes to the extent of ambitions we had.” He stops again. “Clearly hardly any.”

Yet Arctic Monkeys’ friendship has endured, in part, because the band have always known when to say no. They built a fanbase on the basis of a few early demos shared by fans through MySpace, and before the four-piece signed with the independent Domino Records – also home to Wet Leg and Hot Chip – they’d already made a pact to never agree to their music being used in advertising. They even turned down a then-coveted offer to appear on Top Of The Pops. Weeks later, their monstrous debut single ‘I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor’ stormed to the top of the UK Singles Chart instantly – no mean feat for a band without major record label cash or mountains of press on their side. They’d set a precedent to follow their own rules, and it had worked.

Stardom would soon prove to be inescapable, however: the band looked perpetually shellshocked when they broke out as unassuming teenagers with their enduring and now-seminal debut album, 2006’s ‘Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not’. “Somebody call 999, Richard Hawley’s been robbed!,” Turner famously joked, as the band, looking somewhere between a haze of drunkenness and feeling flustered, collected the Mercury Prize later that year. The following decade would see them evolve into the UK’s biggest, most culturally important band: they have gone on to headline Glastonbury twice, perform at the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony and, perhaps most importantly, have remained consistent, while their peers in sound have failed to keep similar longevity.

“When I think back to earlier times, I feel like we were just running on instinct, creative decisions included,” says Turner, with a gentle laugh. “I mean, like, first and foremost, we didn’t really know how to play our instruments at the start. But beyond that, I don’t really think that much within the band has changed a great deal; we might know a few more tricks, but we’re still rolling on that very same instinct.”

Dressed in a royal blue Lacoste jumper, Turner entertains NME for an hour with a boyish and mischievous charm; his few concessions to age include a formal, paisley-patterned silk scarf and some stubble. A gold link chain lays around his neck – a present from his grandfather that he’s worn everywhere since 2006 – and glints against the autumn sun. As he answers questions, Turner often leans back in his chair and starts re-enacting scenes, giving it some real gusto. No man this effortlessly funny is an accident – behind it all lies a bright, astute and often humorous songwriter.

Trying to discuss his lyrics – which, on ‘The Car’, are often uncharacteristically reflective – in the pub with Turner is a different matter, however, met mostly with some hesitant, yet endearing musings on personal growth. We briefly broach ‘Hello You’, which plays with high drama, and references Turner’s youth spent in north Sheffield – but like a big Hollywood production, what’s pizazz on camera is often pain behind the scenes. “I could pass for 17 if I just get a shave / And catch some Zzzs”, he sings at one point, only half-jokingly. “So much of this new music is scratching at the past and how much of it I should hang on to,” he says. “I think that song is pretty on the nose… as uncomfortable as that may be.”

It’s when describing ‘The Car’’s lushly arranged instrumental sections, however, that you can sense the cogs in Turner’s brain are starting to turn a little quicker. “Around the last album, the big story was like, ‘Wow, he’s got a piano’, which was true to an extent, but I wonder now looking at it, that it was this thing that I now do – recording ideas as you go – that got me going,” he says. His sudden excitement moves him to clench a trademark pair of black Ray Ban sunglasses so tightly in his hand, you fear there’s every chance they could suddenly snap.

Working on the album led to Arctic Monkeys scrapping their old rule that everything they recorded had to be playable live, opening up unseen possibilities. Turner experimented with the wah-wah guitar for both ‘Jet Skis On The Moat’ and the ridiculously funky ‘I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am’ – think ‘Station To Station’-era Bowie meets ELO – the latter being the moment “where everything clicked,” he affirms. Where a younger Arctic Monkeys would have raced through punky verses with lethal precision, ‘The Car’ marinates in the textures of upward sweeps and subtle, honeyed soul.

As Turner speaks, it’s easy to picture the studio and imagine the Monkeys, once again, as teenagers in a garage: Turner the leader, Helders and O’Malley the jokers, Cook the near-silent but cunning sage – or, in Turner’s words: “Jamie remains the gatekeeper of the band, as it were.” These days, Cook is the brilliantly straight-faced foil – usually wearing a suit and sunglasses onstage, rocking gently from side to side as he churns out weighty riffs – to Turner’s loose, playful showman.

“I think that’s the key difference maybe with [‘The Car’] and the last record… perhaps we didn’t quite have a grasp of the dynamics of the bigger, newer sounds we were exploring,” he says. “But playing together live again certainly helped us to get there, and we developed a better awareness of each other. You find yourself in a different place when you take the songs to a new setting beyond where they were recorded.”

Even if ‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino’’s complete stylistic overhaul was curious enough to unsettle fans of the band’s louder, scrappier early days, Turner remains adamant that it was the right move for the group at the time. “I’m actually pretty happy with how it went down,” he says today. “We achieved something that we may not have been able to in the past. I think it definitely gave us the confidence to go to a different place on a record.”‘ The Car’’s ‘Sculptures Of Anything Goes’ – the band’s darkest song yet, a beast of distortion and weighty electronics – even nods to the public’s mixed response to ‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino’: “Puncturing your bubble of relatability with your horrible new sound”.

He alludes to how, despite ‘AM’ being the band’s most commercially popular album – having gone platinum in the US – with its West Coast rap-inspired cadences and bass-heavy melodies, it also felt like a bold revamp for Arctic Monkeys at the time of its release. “‘Do I Wanna Know?’ felt like a departure from everything that we had done before – and this was similar,” he says. “We had to almost acknowledge that our sound still had a little grease in its hair, and a bit of aggressiveness.”

Turner says, however, that when Arctic Monkeys played the 26,000-capacity Foro Sol venue in Mexico City in March 2019 as one of the final shows on that tour, it felt like a “brilliant send-off” to what had been their most artistically challenging period. Backstage at that same show, Turner began to “sketch out” demos for ‘The Car’, with the idea that they “could close our shows.” He continues: “I found this footage of me playing a song backstage at that gig, and I thought, ‘I’m going to bottle the energy for the new record.’ It was raw, and full of downstrokes guitar.”

The songs from Foro Sol were eventually scrapped, but if anything, that night proved that the ‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino’ era had certainly unlocked a more lighthearted side to the band than we had seen in several years. Clips of Turner pretending to lose his train of thought as the twinkling keys of ‘One Point Perspective’ fade out – in tandem with the song’s final lyric – have since been memed into oblivion. It’s a simple, yet persistently effective act: each time, he looks suddenly blank, scratches his chin, and points absently in the air as though trying to remember something. “I don’t think it’s even a choice at this point. When that spotlight centres itself on me, I just can’t help myself,” he says.

Why did the routine start in the first place? Turner’s face curls into a convincing knot of embarrassment. “You know what? I ask myself the same question every 24 hours,” he responds.

In August, Arctic Monkeys formally introduced their new era by headlining Reading & Leeds for the third time in their career, and drew in one of the festival’s biggest crowds in the process. Capping off a remarkable summer of huge outdoor shows across Europe, the weekend proved that a new, young, wildly committed generation of Monkeys fans had come to the fore, many of whom arrived via TikTok or streaming services, partly due to the recent stratospheric success of ‘505’ – the first Monkeys track to fully showcase their emotional depth as performers.

Lifted from 2007’s ‘Favourite Worst Nightmare’ album, the surging indie-rock track has recently surpassed hits from Eminem and Coldplay, clocking in an average of 1.7 million plays a month on Spotify alone. The stats are even more impressive when you consider that the band have actively chosen to shun social media throughout their career – it’s almost as though they can’t help gaining worldwide attention.

For Turner, seeing audiences continue to react passionately to encore closer ‘505’ has been “genuinely moving”, but he’s bemused by the revival that has come around in the first place. “Without having ‘505’ at the end of our shows for a few years around 2008, I’m not sure if it would have found the new life it has now,” he says. “I hope that doesn’t sound like I’m taking credit [for the revival] – even if it wasn’t totally unexpected, the attention around [‘505’] is really quite special.”

Arctic Monkeys’ recent live performances have also seen them bring out rarities from their back catalogue, including a moodier rendition of ‘Humbug’ standout ‘Potion Approaching’, and ‘That’s Where You’re Wrong’, a fuzzed-out singalong from the unfairly overlooked ‘Suck It And See’ era. Switching up the setlist has made the band appreciate what they’ve achieved up to this point, Turner explains: “There’s quite a lot of room now for us to unlock songs and these other little things from the past,” he says. “I have almost, like, a PDF in my mind of what we could work on.” His eyebrow arches in confusion. “Wait, it wouldn’t be a PDF, would it? I think I meant to say a spreadsheet…”

It’s this endearing playfulness and intimacy to Turner that makes his disbelief at Arctic Monkeys’ current stature, 20 years into their career, seem genuine. Next summer, they’ll play a full stadium tour across the UK for the first time ever in their career, including two huge hometown shows in Sheffield at Hillsborough Park. Better still, there’s a Glasto-shaped hole in the touring schedule, too.

The scale of these shows is already toying with Turner: “It wouldn’t have made sense for us to play stadiums before this album, and I don’t think we were mentally ready for it up until now,” he says. “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 says that they won’t be taking a string section on the forthcoming tour; instead, the band will be assisted by extra keys and synth. Turner is confident that the new album will translate live, and goes on to liken the rich emotional depth across ‘The Car’ to the searing, heart-raising two-minute guitar breakdown that wraps up ‘A Certain Romance’, the crowning achievement from their debut album. “I remember when we were recording ‘A Certain Romance’ and having a conversation with the producer about the final guitar solo,” he says. “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.”

Are you still proud of that song?

“Yeah,” he replies immediately. “If anything, for the fact that [‘A Certain Romance’] showed that we did actually have these ambitions beyond what we once thought we were capable of. Back then, we would struggle with the idea of adding anything more to the songs; but here, there’s some guitar that goes high, and then comes back in.”

Across the table, he begins to play the air guitar, gleefully wriggling around in his seat. For a moment, it’s as though Turner appears spookily untouched by time: eyes bright, wide, and inquisitive; a flash of youthful, riotous joy writ large across his face. He continues: “When we recorded [‘A Certain Romance’] we were all like, ‘Woah, woah, woah…” He raises his hands above his head once more. “‘What have we done here?’ Pushing the music that far out from what we’d done before initially felt contentious, to say the least.’”

Turner looks happy, calm and content, and he should be – he’s still goofing around on the world’s biggest stages, still making music with his childhood best friends, and caring less about critical reception and more about enjoying himself. ‘The Car’ may see Arctic Monkeys traverse a far greater distance from their zippy indie beginnings than ever before, but there are no regrets, Turner says, before trailing off into another warm anecdote from the time the band spent at Butley Priory.

“The excitement and energy of everybody being together, sharing ideas in the same room, was quite powerful,” Turner says, briefly moving his gaze to the table below. “I noticed that, for instance, when I think about how it felt saying goodbye at the end of that session…” He catches himself, and looks faintly misty-eyed – though he’d never let us see that properly.

Turner turns to face us once more. “It’s just… you know, the air totally changes when the rest of the band leave. I don’t quite know what to call it, but I do know that being around them is how to get that magic – and I haven’t ever found it anywhere else,” he says, with a knowing smile.