Songfacts®:

• The Arctic Monkeys surprised their fans when they posted this song to their website on March 4, 2011. Drummer Matt Helders explained it was not a single, just a tease of what is coming. Six days later the band announced the details of the English rock band's fourth studio album, Suck It and See.
• Produced by their frequent collaborator James Ford, the psychedelic stomp goes straight for the jugular. Eschewing much of his usual wordplay, singer Alex Turner crows, "I wanna rock'n'roll / Brick by brick!"
• Alex Turner told the story of the song to NME: "We were in Miami on tour once and we just got off a long flight to there and we had an idea for a song called 'Brick By Brick' and so we wrote it that night just sorta in a bar. But it was quite loose, we thought about it as the concept of a song and all these things that you want to do- brick by brick- and we just made a list of them that was probably three times as long as what it ended up over that night and the next few weeks."