Perspective May 2018

Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is the sixth studio album by English indie rock band Arctic Monkeys. It will be released on 11 May 2018 through the Domino Recording Company, following up AM (2013). It is produced by frequent Arctic Monkeys collaborator James Ford and band frontman Alex Turner. The album was written by Turner on a piano, and features a lush sound; a departure from the band's previous guitar-heavy work. Its lyrical content is influenced by science fiction, and explores politics, religion and technology.

When Tom Petty died in October 2017, he left behind a vault overflowing with hundreds of hours of unheard music. Much of it came from concerts, but there were also tons of demos, alternative versions of album tracks and even tunes he discarded completely over the years that have never been released. Once the initial shock of his sudden death subsided, his wife Dana, daughter Adria, producer Ryan Ulyate and bandmates Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench began poring through the material to create the upcoming four-CD box set An American Treasure, which arrives in stores on September 28th.

Liberation arrives in 2018, six years after Lotus, by far the longest stretch of time between Christina Aguilera albums. During that hiatus Aguilera wasn't exactly in hibernation but she wasn't prominent, taking a couple of seasons off from the televised singing competition The Voice to raise a child and spending as much time onscreen as she did on-stage when she re-emerged in the middle of the 2010s. Aguilera may have been omnipresent in showbiz but she was largely absent from the pop charts. Save a handful of duets – "Moves Like Jagger," which appeared in 2011 in the first flush of The Voice's success; "Feel This Moment," a 2013 Pitbull hit; "Say Something," a 2013 Great Big World single featuring Christina on vocals – Aguilera hadn't reached the American Top Ten since 2008's "Keeps Gettin' Better," fanbait added to her hits collection of the same name.