Alex Turner says Arctic Monkeys are “shuffling the deck” for Reading & Leeds setlist

nme.com:

Alex Turner has spoken about what to expect from Arctic Monkeys‘ upcoming headline performances at Reading & Leeds 2022.The Sheffield band, who announced their seventh album ‘The Car’ today (August 24), will top the bill at the dual festival this weekend as part of their current European tour.Recent gigs have seen the Monkeys dust off ‘Potion Approaching’ for the first time since 2011 and play ‘That’s Where You’re Wrong’ for the first time since 2013. ‘AM’ ballad ‘I Wanna Be Yours’ has also made an unexpected return.Last night, Turner and co.

treated the crowd at Zurich Openair festival by debuting an as-yet-unreleased track called ‘I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am’.During a new interview with the Big Issue, Turner opened up about the process of putting together an Arctic Monkeys setlist in 2022 as the group enter their next era.“It’s quite mysterious, to me, right now, at this moment in time, the setlist and what the order of that should be,” the frontman said.“This time has passed over the last few years and certain things don’t feel the way you expected them to anymore.

That sounds sad, but it’s not. There are just certain things that represented certain moments in the past that now feel like something else, so they should be somewhere else.”As for what fans at Reading & Leeds can expect, Turner explained: “I’m still definitely very much working it out.

It’s exciting to perform again, but we are still shuffling the deck on the setlist.”Back in 2020, drummer Matt Helders said that Arctic Monkeys were often reluctant to perform some of their older material on-stage because it felt like they were “doing karaoke”.“[It] feel[s] like a caricature,” he reasoned at the time.