EVEN though Arctic Monkeys kingpin Alex Turner has been at pains to state he couldn’t face making another album of songs about “taxi ranks”, plenty of his band’s disciples would have been happy for him to do exactly that.

Growing up in public is hard enough work without people not wanting you to grow up, and the Monkeys’ previous excursion, last year’s hesitant, underwhelming Humbug, reflected a band at a crossroads.

Suck It And See is more confident in name and deed. It’s the album the Monkeys had to make, made at the point it needed to be made. The mercurial yelp-and-thrash of their early work is no more, replaced with structured, sure-footed songwriting which echoes the likes of Nick Cave, while the guitars now jangle and glint, John Squire-style, where they used to growl and grind. It could be a late-Eighties indie album, and it doesn’t suffer for that.

Apart from when the drains get blocked on the lumpen Brick By Brick, Library Pictures and All My Own Stunts, Suck It And See is a triumph of maturity, pace-changing and tunes, from the Merseybeat-with-muscle of She’s Thunderstorms and Black Treacle to the wistful Love Is A Laserquest. And although Turner’s lyrical radar often goes awry, he’s inspired on That’s Where You’re Wrong, the stand-out track and the best song Echo And The Bunnymen never wrote: “Don’t take it so personally/You’re not the only one that time has got it in for”. The Monkeys aren’t the sort of band to con themselves that anything lasts forever. Just enjoy them while they’re on this sort of form.