Four years after their latest and visionary sci-fi record – Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino – today Arctic Monkeys are back with a highly anticipated new album called The Car. Among the various quotes scattered throughout the 10 songs of the British band there is also a small tribute to the videogame worldspecifically a Nintendo DS game released in 2009.
The reference is contained in the third track of the album called Sculptures of Anything Goes, and the homage is to the game City Lifea city builder developed by Monte Cristo and released for PC (in 2006) and later landed on Nintendo DS (in 2009).
The Arctic Monkeys mention City Builder in a song from The Car
In the third verse of Sculptures of Anything Goes the text reads: “The simulation cartridge for City Life ’09 is pretty tricky to come by”, which translated into Italian would be: “The simulation cartridge for City Life 09 is quite difficult to find”.
Genius Lyrics explains us che Alex Turner – singer and songwriter – refers to the near impossibility of obtaining game cartridges on DS, as production has been unfriendly since 2014 and in 2020 Nintendo announced that it would stop selling games for old DS platforms and Wii.
The song itself is a huge homage, as is often the case in Artctic Monkeys songs, to other works. In a recent interview with Radio X, Alex Turner stated that the title of the song is inspired by the opening sequence of Indiana Jones and the cursed temple, a film directed by Steven Spielberg in 1984. In the opening scene we see Kate Capshaw singing a Mandarin Chinese version of Anything Goes by Cole Porter.
The Car by the Arctic Monkeys is available today for streaming on digital platforms and for purchase in CD, LP and audio cassette formats starting today.