Arctic Monkeys recorded their new album in California because they wanted to capture Nirvana’s drum sound.

The ‘Cornerstone’ band wanted to recreate the towering percussion featured on the grunge band’s 1991 breakthrough record ‘Nevermind’, so they made their LP in the same studio, Sound City Studios in Van Nuys.

Singer Alex Turner explained: “We wanted to try and record pretty live, and the drum room there is where they did ‘Nevermind’, so that was a big draw.”

Despite the recording taking place on the US West Coast, Alex wrote most of the songs in New York, where he was living in a fourth floor apartment with his TV presenter girlfriend, Alexa Chung.

He said: “It’s the first time I’ve not written on the ground floor. We had ‘Transformers’ on the TV on mute and started playing all this, like, chimey guitar. I’d love to tell you that we were watching French new wave cinema, but no, we were watching ‘Transformers’.”

Arctic Monkeys’ fourth album, ‘Suck it and See’ will be released on June 6.