If architecture is frozen music, what’s the tune embedded in the cover of the Arctic Monkeys’ latest album, “The Car”? The image, a photograph taken by Matt Helders, the band’s drummer and documentarian, shows a rooftop parking lot from high above, surrounded by modern office buildings in downtown Los Angeles. A single car, a white sedan, is parked in the lot, which is bleached by the midday Southern California sun.

The four-piece British rock band was in town recently for two sold-out shows at Forest Hills Stadium. On the morning between gigs, Helders went to Fotografiska New York, the U.S. branch of the Swedish photography museum. He wanted to check out an exhibition of the work of Terry O’Neill, the British lensman who assisted in the birth of rock photography, in the early sixties. Helders carried his digital Leica.

Over an Americano in the museum’s lobby, he explained that he’d shot the cover photo with a long lens from the window of his former apartment, and had sent it to Alex Turner, the band’s main songwriter and front man. “This was in 2019, before we’d started any music for the album,” he said. Helders, thirty-seven, is a sometime boxer; his drumming has a pugilistic quality. “Alex was, like, ‘Oh, wow.’ He thought it told a story and that he might write something about it.” There’s a mystery in the image—Is that a getaway car? Is there a body in the trunk?—that resonates in the album’s enigmatic songs and atmospheric strings, a new sound for the Monkeys.

“Me and Alex have known each other since we were five,” Helders went on. All four bandmates grew up within fifty yards of one another in Sheffield, an industrial city where “everything we did was in cars.” The fact that they were friends long before they became musical partners explains why they get along so well as a band, Helders figures. That’s also why, in his photos of them, Helders favors domestic scenes over the iconic style of photographers like O’Neill. In his pictures of the guys together, he observed, “it’s not clear they’re a band. They’re not doing anything that’s rock, but you can tell there’s something about them.”

Helders, who has a soft-spoken demeanor, strives to be “a drummer in life,” he said. That is a person others can rely on, he explained, who doesn’t need or want to be a star. On the road, Helders prefers Ramadas and DoubleTrees to luxury hotels: “I get overwhelmed by having to use all the amenities.”

As a photographer, he said, “I try to make the mundane interesting.” When he took his Leica to Big Bear City, in Southern California, the most striking image he got was not of the scenery but of an overflowing trash can in the sun, which Helders labelled on his Instagram with a quote from William Eggleston, a favorite photographer: “There is no particular reason to search for meaning.”

Helders’s pictures give you the drummer in life’s point of view: the world as seen from the rear of the stage. He has many photos of Alex Turner’s back, of course, taken at sound checks, but also lots of other backs, of both people and buildings, snapped during tour stops. “I have a folder on my phone called ‘The Backs,’ ” he said. “If I’m walking around the street and someone looks interesting from the back, that’s fine with me. I don’t need to ask them to turn around.”

At the exhibition upstairs, Helders browsed foundational glamour images in the visual vocabulary of pop stardom. David Bowie visiting Elizabeth Taylor on a movie set; the Rolling Stones carrying their luggage through a busy London street, off to a gig; Tom Jones man-spreading astride a go-cart in his driveway. Cigarettes, bottles of alcohol, and guns are present in many of O’Neill’s photos—a reminder that rock and roll is not a wholesome activity. But, Helders observed, “now you’re likely to see the band doing a yoga class.”

Gazing at an image of Elton John inside his private plane, Helders said, “I do have one like that.” He scrolled through his Leica until he got to some pictures of the Monkeys boarding a private jet, at an earlier stop on the American tour. Then he scrolled to another photo: a row of orange safety cones lined up on the runway.

“That’s more me,” the drummer said. ♦