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Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is a concept album depicting a luxury hotel at Tranquility Base, the location of the 1969 moon landing. Lyrically, the album refers frequently to science fiction, incorporating hyperrealist satire and ``interstellar escapism'' in order to explore entertainment's role in periods of social change: ``the desire to escape into it, and the desire to create it''. This is influenced by current politics in the United States, as well as consumerism, fame, religion and technology, with the ``forgetful, distractible oddballs'' Turner embodies as narrators frequently becoming distracted from its social commentary. These multiple narrators are unreliable, ``sometimes barely (able to) string a sentence together'' and were inspired by lounge music. Turner uses multiple vocal tones to embody the different characters, with his wide vocal range incorporating both deep and falsetto singing styles. The album's lyrical voice has been described as ``absurdist suave'', in oppose to the ``witty sleaze'' of Turner's previous work, and has been compared to Argentinian short-story writer Jorge Luis Borges. The dense and self-aware lyrics have been described as ``endlessly quotable'', written in a rambling, stream-of-consciousness style. Turner cited various films as influencing the lyrics, including Spirits of the Dead (1968), World on a Wire (1973) and the works of Jean-Pierre Melville. Furthermore, the ideas present within the books Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) by Neil Postman and Infinite Jest (1996) by David Foster Wallace inspired Turner's philosophical exploration of the modern human condition.
Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino