Bright eyed, tousle-headed, with a look halfway between penitence and innocence, Submarine star Craig Roberts stares back at you from the cover of Alex Turner’s soundtrack to the buzzy indie comedy. The two make quite a pair; young Roberts looks a bit like Turner did when we first met him and the Arctic Monkeys five years ago. But Turner’s not a young man anymore, and over the years, the the cynical smirk with which he greeted everything on those early Arctics records has threatened to turn to a scowl. On title alone, the forthcoming Arctic Monkeys album Suck It and See doesn’t offer much confidence that above-it-all hasn’t finally given way to fuck-it-all. But the songs he’s written for Submarine—the story of 15-year-old Roberts navigating the cusp of manhood—find Turner sounding more revived, more assured, and in a sense, more himself than he has for some time.
Submarine collects five and a half new Turner songs—a few lilting ballads with minimal adornment, and a couple of mid-tempo pop tunes often calling to mind the spare, stately beauty of Turner’s countryman Richard Hawley. It’s a brief, fairly unassuming set, pulling back on both the Monkeys’ linguistic barrage and the symphonic flourishes that Turner and Miles Kane deploy in the Last Shadow Puppets. He’s long been an ace at the narrative lyric, unspooling yarns into tangled, cutting slices-of-life. But with the film providing the storyline, Turner’s lyrics tend toward impressionistic details and wallflower observations, filling in the picture rather than trying to retell the script in song. Though some of these stray lines can feel a bit adrift without a plot, Turner’s keen wit and eye for detail coalesces into a tender portrayal of that resolute adolescent uncertainty, of figuring things out as they go.
Highlight “Hiding Tonight” succinctly captures that uniquely teenage feeling that tomorrow is bound to be transformative, so worry can wait. “Glass in the Park” sounds like a lazy afternoon between two young lovers, whispering impossibly grand promises to each other. “It’s Hard to Get Around the Wind” is a touch more inscrutable, a Dylanesque puzzler that touches on desert spoons, X-Men pinball, and coming to terms with fate. Here, the images get a bit tough to follow line for line, but the overarching notion that we’re forced to accept some things we don’t understand comes through clearly enough. “Stuck on the Puzzle” is the set’s most musically straightforward track, with a fuller sound bolstered by psych-pop flourishes. Closer “Piledriver Waltz” tells an odd tale of breakfast at the Heartbreak Hotel and reminding someone, “If you’re gonna try to walk on water, make sure to wear your comfortable shoes.” “Waltz,” which Turner intends to revive on Suck It, proves the set’s lone dip in quality; its parade of images is a tad too clarity averse, although it gets by on the constant motion of its melody.
Matched to this sophisticated, admirably restrained music, Turner’s Submarine songs have a backwards-looking quality, a guy who’s been through it calmly reexamining the scars and renavigating the pitfalls. In playing up the contradictions of youth without being cloying about the real feelings behind them, Turner’s songs feel sharply observed and very true-to-life, even at their most lyrically impenetrable. Far from the weariness at the center of Humbug and the early Suck It songs, Submarine’s rich, reminiscent tone finds Turner sounding very much at ease with himself and his talents, offering a swift but satisfying glimpse at that same charming, circumspect young man we knew back when.
