Domino The Last Shadow Puppets, the duo made up of Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner and collaborator Miles Kane, will release their sophomore album, Everything You've Come to Expect, on April 1. The album comes eight years after the Puppets' 2008 debut, The Age of the Understatement, which makes it difficult to know what to expect from a new Puppets album. That, of course, is the joke of the record's title.
"I think that was part of the reason we chose it, to be honest," Turner tells ABC Radio. "The fact that...yeah, there is nothing to...like how could you?"
Turner and Kane started The Last Shadow Puppets as an "experiment," which allowed them to "use chord progressions and instruments and lyrical ideas, even, that almost had seemed prohibited to us in what we'd been working on before." That, combined with the wait in between albums, gave the duo almost a blank slate when it came to write Everything You've Come to Expect.
"I think it was already bound to be pretty different, I think," Turner says of Everything You've Come to Expect. "I think it was more of a question of how do you relate it to [The Age of the Understatement]? That was sort of the more difficult thing in a way."
Everything You've Come to Expect does share a few threads with its predecessor -- the album retains the cinematic quality of The Age of the Understatement thanks to the dramatic string arrangements. In Turner's estimation, though, the biggest difference between the two albums simply comes down to quality, especially with the vocals.
"The first time we did [a Last Shadow Puppets album] was the first time we tried to sing like that, even. Obviously enough time's passed now that hopefully we're a bit better at that," Turner tells ABC Radio. "The harmonies are more interesting, and there's more work with vocal harmony than we were able to do last time, I think. I think it's just sort of more effective."
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