Arctic Monkeys have spoken about their plans for the follow-up to Suck It And See and have hinted that their next album may be filled with faster songs.

Speaking to Spinner, bassist Nick O’Malley stressed that it was early days in the writing process, but that the band had a rough idea of what they wanted to do.

Asked about album number five, he replied: “It’s quite early days yet. We’ve not really got any songs for it at all. So it’s difficult to say what the record will be like. But we’re enjoying playing sort of fast songs at the minute, so maybe that’ll be an indication that it may go that way.”

Drummer Matt Helders added that recent releases “R U Mine?” and “Electricity” were unlikely to feature on the album, but may well be a sign of things to come from the band.

He added: “‘R U Mine’ and ‘Electricity’ are just stand-alone singles, but like he said, the songs like that are the most recent things we’ve done, so if that’s any sign of what kind of songs we’re writing, maybe we’ll go that way.”

The drummer also spoke about the band’s recent Record Store Day release of “R U Mine?” on purple vinyl and said that they felt it was important to be involved in Record Store Day.

He said of this: “I think Record Store Day needs to happen to keep people aware that there’s a better way of listening to music available. And it’s good. Then bands get involved and do something special to give people an incentive to buy it, I suppose. For instance, our record is purple, which means it’s more attractive to the eye. I don’t know why we chose purple. We’d already done a white one before.”

Then asked why they’d chosen purple, he replied: “We’re big fans of Barney.”