Four Out Of Five

The Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino album has a loose sci-fi theme running through it with the Arctic Monkeys being a lounge act in a luxury resort on the moon. This song finds Alex Turner singing about the album's titular fictional lunar hotel (with accompanying rooftop taqueria).

The name of the Taqueria is The Information Action Ratio, a phrase lifted from cultural critic Neil Postman's 1985 work Amusing Ourselves to Death. In short, the Information Action Ratio is a reference to the idea of how we have so much knowledge at our fingertips without quite knowing what action, we might reasonably be expected to take once we learn it. "I think one of the things I liked about that phrase is that you sort of know exactly what it is right away," Turner told NME. The information action ratio is the place to go Four stars out of five I put a taqueria on the moon It got rave reviews Four stars out of five Turner explained to Pitchfork: "I lifted it from this book called Amusing Ourselves to Death. I was attracted to the idea as soon as I heard that phrase; even though it was in this book from [1985] it still seemed relevant—more relevant than it probably was when the guy made it up. I sang it into the tape recorder when I was making stuff up one day, and it ended up falling in a place where the implication was it was the name of this taco shop on the roof of this hotel complex."

Most of the songs featured on Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino were written in 2016 by Alex Turner on a piano at his Los Angeles Home, with his vocals recorded on a Tascam 388 8-track recording machine. Turner played his bandmates the demos in February 2017, before laying down the tracks at Hollywood's Vox Studios and France's La Frette, a studio built within a 19th century mansion. While at La Frette, the Arctic Monkeys tried to channel the approach that Phil Spector took on Dion's 1975 album Born to Be With You. "I think over time you just learn that [the magic is made] with a lot of people in the room all at once and everything spilling over all the microphones," Turner told Billboard. "We did a little bit of that on this album, but one day I'd like to go the whole way there." Turner pointed to the outro on "Four Out of Five" as an example of Born to Be With You's influence.