Ladies and gentlemen, Arctic Monkeys are still floating in space. For the second album in a row, one of the world’s greatest and most unbelievably consistent rock bands have jettisoned themselves into the final frontier, diving deeper and deeper into sonic wormholes that lead thousands of miles away from anything resembling what they once sounded like. Intentional or not, there’s a sense of irony that the Sheffield-hailing lads’ first album in four years is called The Car; the terrain that Arctic Monkeys are charting on their seventh full-length is absolutely unsuitable for a four-wheeler, or anything that doesn’t require some sort of jet propulsion. Nodding to the conceptual framework of 2018’s instant classic Tranquility Base Hotel And Casino, Alex Turner introduced his latest with the promise that “on this record, sci-fi is off the table. We are back to Earth.” That may be true where the subject matter is concerned, but sonically speaking, if you were hoping for a return to hard-charging normalcy… well, there’s the airlocked door.