British alt-rockers Arctic Monkeys recently released their third album, Humbug. (Domino Records/Outside Music)

In some ways, Arctic Monkeys could be seen as the definitive band of the Oughts. London's Guardian newspaper certainly thinks so, having recently named them "Newcomers of the decade.”

To record Humbug, Arctic Monkeys holed up in the Mojave Desert with producer Josh Homme, best known for creating heavy rock anthems with Queens of the Stone Age and Them Crooked Vultures.

This unassuming British quartet has only released a trio of LPs, the latest being Humbug, which came out in August. But they've got a handful of prestigious prizes under their collective belts, including a Mercury Music Prize (for Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not) and a handful of BRIT awards. Not bad for a band that began as a pastime for a gaggle of bored teenagers in a suburb of Sheffield, England, back in 2001.

The group members' youth – co-founders Alex Turner and Jamie Cook were 15 and 16, respectively – worked to their advantage: they burned copies of their demo recordings on home computers and gave away their songs for free to the kids who turned out for local shows in Sheffield. In turn, those web-savvy supporters helped make the Monkeys an internet sensation, trading MP3s through file-sharing channels and flocking to a fan-created MySpace page.

By the time the Arctic Monkeys put out their first proper album, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, in January of 2006, they were already a buzz band. Consequently, that record became the fastest-selling debut in British history. (It was recently surpassed by Susan Boyle's I Dreamed a Dream.) Listeners were enamoured of the group's bristling guitar riffs and muscular drums. Meanwhile, frontman Alex Turner was declared the voice of his generation, thanks to his tales of petulant English kids getting their swagger on in suburban pubs and clubs. His lyrics were laced with the region's lingua franca and delivered with the perfect attitude of cool detachment.

(Domino Records/Outside Music)

Looking back, Turner still seems overwhelmed to be seen as a spokesman for Young Sheffield, let alone Generation Y.

"Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not was the second wave of songs I ever wrote," he says during a recent phone interview from his new home in Brooklyn, N.Y. (He moved there this year to be closer to his girlfriend, MTV host Alexa Chung.) "The first wave, that's when you're just fooling around and you don't know what you're doing. But then I do remember a time when I started trying to write three or four songs that were very specific and meticulous and detailed tales." He pauses. "Detailed tales! That's two terrible words to put together. Quite sixth-form, innit? Disgusting."

Having dispensed with the self-criticism, Turner continues. "Anyhow, those songs, and certainly the words in those lyrics – those were designed for our group of friends, to make them crack a smile. I'd write things deliberately to elicit a reaction from my mates, so it was just a lot of punchlines. And then it all blew up for us."

These days, the Arctic Monkeys are looking far beyond their close-knit community for inspiration. For Humbug, they holed up in the Mojave Desert near California with producer Josh Homme, best known for creating heavy rock anthems as part of groups like Queens of the Stone Age, Eagles of Death Metal and Them Crooked Vultures. For Humbug, Turner says, he and his mates moved out of their comfort zones, both geographically and sonically.

"It started with this plan to take it out of the country," he begins. "We wanted to go over there to the desert where we weren't familiar with the surroundings, and we'd not ever been in a recording situation that was anything like [this one]. Before you start something like that, you're not sure whether all those factors are going to affect you – it's easy to be so blasé about the whole thing. But once we arrived, it seemed like we were sort of separate from everything we knew."

According to Turner, that distance gave the four Monkeys a new sense of possibility. "It was an experiment to start with," he laughs. You can hear the results in the eerie, Zeppelin-esque melody that opens Dangerous Animals, a strutting psychedelic number with clattering percussion and angular riffs. Cornerstone, on the other hand, is a quiet, contemplative love song with kaleidoscopic backwards-looped effects — it's equal parts Belle and Sebastian and George Harrison. Fire and the Thud conjures visions of Jim Morrison in a boudoir with its muted come-ons and serpentine slide guitar.

"I feel like it's really a guitar record," Turner notes. "Josh doused our fears of playing guitar. In the past, we'd have these quite short, punky solos, but he and Alain Johannes, who's a terrific guitarist and engineered the whole record – being with those guys is really inspiring. Using slide guitar — well, I'd not ventured down that alley before, but now I love it!"

Perhaps the greatest shift, though, can be heard in Turner's development as a songwriter. Those "detailed tales" and argot-heavy "punchlines" are a thing of the past. Now, he spins cryptic yarns in the style of Nick Cave, a man whose "cracking couplets" Turner finds inspiring.

Arctic Monkeys perform in Spain. (Alberto Saiz/AFP/Getty Images)

That attention to songcraft sets the Monkeys apart from many of their peers. The fact of the matter is that even as Turner and Cook were practising Oasis chords in Cook's father's garage, there were legions of other young hungry wannabe rockers doing the same thing all around the world. Arguably, what made Arctic Monkeys fly head and shoulders above the rest was that knack for sharp, candid storytelling that always shone through their brash, punchy riffs. While the novelty of being a promising newcomer fades over time, Turner's gift for telling tales has grown more sophisticated – and luckily, his bandmates have matched him by learning to create more evocative soundscapes.

"I've always written quite a lot, but I always used to attach this idea to writing songs," Turner explains. "Like, there's a light and you wake up sweating with this entire song in your head. What I think that stops you from doing is sitting down and crafting and not being able to take a couple months on and off. [You're prevented from] coming back to things and trying to improve them."

He laughs. "The songs I'm happiest with on this last record are the ones where I started out with 11 verses and kept weeding them out and changing them around. I used to worry that if you did that, you'd kill it. And now, at least, I don't believe that to be true."

Humbug is in stores now. The Arctic Monkeys play the Metropolis in Montreal on Dec. 14.

Sarah Liss writes about the arts for CBC News.