Arctic Monkeys UK Tour 2026 — Dates, Venues & Tickets

Arctic Monkeys UK Tour 2026 — All Dates

Arctic Monkeys UK Tour — FAQ

About Arctic Monkeys

Arctic Monkeys formed in 2002 in High Green, a suburb on the northern edge of Sheffield, when four schoolfriends from Stocksbridge High and nearby Birley Community College pooled the Christmas guitar money to start a band. The original lineup was Alex Turner on lead vocals and guitar, Jamie Cook on rhythm guitar, Andy Nicholson on bass, and Matt Helders on drums; Nicholson left in 2006 mid-tour exhaustion and was replaced by Nick O'Malley, who has held the bass chair ever since. The band rehearsed in a Neepsend warehouse called Yellow Arch Studios, played their first paid gig at The Grapes in Sheffield city centre in June 2003, and built a local following the old-fashioned way — burning their early demos onto CD-Rs and handing them out at gigs, where fans then ripped, uploaded, and shared the tracks on the file-sharing site SoundClick and on early MySpace pages. By the time the band signed to Domino Records in June 2005, songs like Fake Tales of San Francisco, I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor, and Mardy Bum were already known word-for-word by the Boardwalk crowd. I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor went straight to number one on the UK Singles Chart in October 2005, the follow-up When the Sun Goes Down repeated the feat in January 2006, and the debut album Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not — released 23 January 2006 — became the fastest-selling debut album in British chart history, shifting 363,735 copies in its first week and winning the 2006 Mercury Prize. Favourite Worst Nightmare followed in April 2007, recorded fast and loud at Miloco Studios in Hackney, hit number one in the UK, won Best British Group at the Brits, and produced Brianstorm, Fluorescent Adolescent, and 505 — songs that have not left the live set in nearly twenty years. The Josh Homme-produced Humbug in 2009 was the band's first creative pivot, recorded in Joshua Tree and at Rancho de la Luna in Yucca Valley, slowing the tempo, deepening the guitars, and pulling the writing toward Crying Lightning, Cornerstone, and the title-track desert-rock heaviness. Suck It and See (2011) reset the band's pop instincts; AM (2013) was the breakthrough. Recorded at Sage and Sound in Los Angeles with Homme, James Ford, and Ross Orton, AM gave the band Do I Wanna Know? (a Spotify and YouTube generational anthem with over two billion streams), R U Mine?, Why'd You Only Call Me When You're High?, and Arabella, sold more than 7 million copies worldwide, headlined Glastonbury 2013, and made the band genuine arena and stadium headliners across the Americas for the first time. The 2018 follow-up Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino was a deliberate hard turn into lounge piano, Mellotron, and sci-fi concept songwriting; it divided the critical reception, hit number one in the UK and the US, and won the band the 2019 Mercury Prize nomination alongside Brit and Grammy nominations. The Car (October 2022) was a further refinement — orchestral strings, baritone croon, slower tempos, and songs like There'd Better Be a Mirrorball, Body Paint, and I Ain't Quite Where I Think I Am that bedded into the live set seamlessly alongside the older material. Across the seven albums Arctic Monkeys have sold more than 25 million records worldwide, headlined Glastonbury three times, won seven Brit Awards, taken the Mercury Prize once (for Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino in 2018 — Alex Turner's second after the debut), and remain the only act to have sent two debut singles to number one in the UK within a four-month window. The lineup has been the same four people since 2006.

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