On the long, winding road that transformed Arctic Monkeys from gnarly, spiky-haired noughties Sheffield indie clubbers to the alluringly smooth hotel lounge crooners of 2022 album The Car, the 2013 single Do I Wanna Know? was a seismic turning point.
With 2012 single R U Mine?, the band had dabbled with a slick, heavy rock sound that reflected their new lives in the sun-drenched valleys and vast concrete highways of California.
It showed promise; but their follow-up single fully defined their onward direction.
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“We had this idea for a record where you take the compositional perspective of an R&B producer and apply that to a four-piece rock ’n’ roll band,” frontman Alex Turner told Q magazine. Influenced hip-hop’s huge presence in California, they started “manipulating our instruments to make building blocks for the song in a way I’d imagine Timbaland constructs music”.
Do I Wanna Know? started with a four-track recorder. For drummer Matt Helders, moving to this piece of equipment necessitated a plainer, more simplified beat, but one that “knocks the way the drums knock on a 50 Cent song”.
Across AM – the album that Do I Wanna Know? opened – grooves came first. But what seriously elevated the track was its bulky, daringly spacious 12-second guitar riff, brooding and full of pauses that accentuated its massive anthemic quality.
The melody was first laid down during a two-week session at Josh Homme’s famed Californian desert studio, Joshua Tree, where the band recorded their gorgeously moody, dust-caked 2009 departure record Humbug. “Perhaps there’s a bit of the desert in that husky drum sound,” Turner later reflected.
According to Helders, Do I Wanna Know? was “probably the only song that survived from that session – although not in the form it is now”. He added: “It was really bassy, and it didn’t have that big chorus – it was basically just the drum loop. But it set the path for the rest of the album. After we recorded it, we knew we were really on to something.”
Turner developed that iconic guitar riff on a 12-string Vox Star Stream, an instrument he “bought as a bit of a joke [which] turned into an inspirational instrument” according to esteemed producer and long-time Arctic Monkeys collaborator James Ford.
At several points since, Turner has floated the wonderfully romantic notion that certain old instruments already have powerful songs and ideas stored inside them, and his job is simply to coax them out. “I feel like that song was a ghost within the walls of this old guitar that I bought,” he told GRAMMYS in 2014.
The track’s impact was huge. Sonically, it laid the groundwork for what came next: the tough, impactful, simplified rhythm sections, Turner’s more studied, intentional guitar style, and crucially, a far more innovative, complex approach to vocals.
Initially, the falsetto call-and-response vocals that drive the track forward were to be delivered by indie rockers HAIM, but their studio commitments prevented them from taking part (Este Haim later called this moment “maybe the worst day of my life”).
Instead, Helders and bassist Nick O’Malley took to the mic, adopting the role of Turner’s “space choirboys” as he put it after. Their pitched-up lines collided enticingly with his lead vocals, and this concoction ultimately inspired the group to lean heavily into more complex harmonies and melodic arrangements on subsequent albums AM, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino and The Car: a significant change in direction.
Today, Do I Wanna Know? is unquestionably the band’s biggest-ever single, with over 3 billion Spotify streams and almost 2 billion YouTube views on the music video, a beautiful piece of fluid, shapeshifting artwork created by animators Blinkink under the direction of David Wilson.
Inspired by the work of risqué cartoonist Vince Collins, the irony of the video is that were it released today, it would smack of generative AI. In 2013, though, it was a visual treat that played a huge role in the single’s global explosion.
And that explosion was profound. The sonic and stylistic shift marked by Do I Wanna Know? – ands solidified later that year with the release of AM and other billion-stream-plus tracks like I Wanna Be Yours, Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High, and No. 1 Party Anthem – gave Arctic Monkeys unprecedented worldwide reach.
As well as becoming the first-ever group to score five consecutive independently released UK No 1 albums, they finally cracked America, debuting at No 6 on the US Billboard (their first Top 10), and amassing a mainstream US audience for the first time.
Do I Wanna Know? was the turning point, a seismic moment that facilitated the band’s fascinating subsequent evolution. Over a decade on, fans still can’t stop crawlin’ back to it.
