“Are You That Somebody?” “How Soon Is Now?” Hell: “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” There are too many examples in the ol’ iTunes library to generalize too much, but songs with question marks in the title often tend to have a seductive quality. The open-endedness creates the possibility of intimacy. Arctic Monkeys toyed with the format on the cheeky title track of 2006’s Who the Fuck Are Arctic Monkeys? EP, but they first fully embraced the allure of question-love on last year’s Record Store Day single “R U Mine?,” a muscular fuzz-rocker with falsetto backing vocals that wouldn’t be out of place on a mix balanced out by, say, Miguel’s “How Many Drinks?”
The U.K. rockers have been playing a couple of new songs live recently, including mellow “Mad Sounds” but also bristling “Do I Wanna Know?” Now they’ve released the full studio version of the latter question-mark-haver to iTunes, and it expertly mixes the friskiness of “R U Mine?” with the sleazy lurch of this Queens of the Stone Age-collaborating band’s Josh Homme-assisted 2009 album Humbug. “I’m sorry to interrupt, it’s just that I’m constantly on the cusp of trying to kiss you,” frontman Alex Turner sneers. “I just don’t know if you feel the same as I do.” After the video, all sound waves and hallucinatory cartoons, any questions asked are answered.
