New Recordings

Pop The Arctic Monkeys' debut, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, arrived early last year amidst such deafening hype that it was hard to accept that the album justified it. The young quartet from Sheffield, England, possessed a wordy, sharp and observant writer in Alex Turner, and like their recent forebears the Libertines, they demonstrated a refreshing affinity for early rock and pop. One b-side found them covering "Baby, It's You," the old Shirelles song.