For years, the clamour for Arctic Monkeys to come to the Philippines has been a little more than a murmur – hushed, not uproarious at all, but plain as day. The past decade here has seen the rise of music festivals, and you’d hear “Arctic Monkeys, please” muttered like clockwork every festival and concert season.

That epoch – the peak of tumblr, LimeWire, hipsterism and indie sleaze – has come and gone, but Arctic Monkeys has been an enduring icon of those fun times, even with a plague turning the world upside down.

Countless replays of 'Piledriver Waltz' and 'Cornerstone' later, I look back and ponder if the British rock quartet’s headlining show announcement came as a surprise at all. The last three years were surely disorienting, but the buzz that followed showed that Manila had been always calling for Sheffield’s best.

A crowd somewhere near the 9,000 mark, as counted by organiser Karpos Multimedia, trooped over to a sprawling field in Manila’s southern suburbia, which had just hosted Wanderland’s comeback edition.

I scanned the grounds and realised that some spectators were around the same age as the band’s 2006 debut record or even their sophomore outing, Your Favourite Worst Nightmare. (Is this the impact of Tiktok? '505' kind of experienced a resurgence there, after all.) No lies – I was a little puzzled, but if anything, this could be an indication that this generation-defining band had reached cultural touchstone status.

Their current tour comes on the heels of their latest record, The Car, a languid and jazzy opus that inevitably bears little resemblance to their work circa AM (2013) and before. “Rather than strings on top of rock,” frontman Alex Turner told The Guardian, “I was interested in switching the ‘rock band’ bit on and off.”

It was unusually cool and windy this time of the year in the city. The crowd hurtled and swarmed close to the barricades, eager for this moment, having waited for days and years. When the band finally took the stage, everyone had just erupted into shouting.

The 21-song set’s overture, 'Sculptures of Anything Goes' from The Car, was a peculiarly elegiac number to start the show with. As the track went on, in Alex’s distinct timbre, it almost seemed like it was an answer to the reception of their more recent fare: “Guess I’m talking to you now / Puncturing your bubble of relatability / With your horrible new sound.” But this was hardly a hint of things to come.

Alex, with Jamie Cook, Nick O’Malley, and Matt Helders, took us through the expanse of their well-loved back catalogue, throwing in high-octane selections from all the way back – for instance, 'Brianstorm,' 'Teddy Picker,' and the all-time favourite 'I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor'.

Hits from their suave, funk-laced milestone album AM were in the mix, too. This included 'Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High,' 'Arabella,' 'Do I Wanna Know,' and 'R U Mine?'.

They paced and punctuated with slow-burning and ballad-esque numbers: the likes of 'Cornerstone,' 'Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino,' 'Body Paint,' and 'There’d Better Be a Mirrorball.'

The crowd relished every moment of the show – singing in chorus, word-for-word, and out loud. In 'Do I Wanna Know?' for example, they even sang back key lines in harmony. As Alex crooned, “If this feeling flows both ways,” they answered: “Sad to see you go.”

“What a night,” said Alex in a rare second of banter in between their songs. The man is one of the most influential frontmen out there right now, and when he speaks, there’s weight in his brevity.

As the show was about to end, he waved to the crowd bathed in the glaring spotlights, and told everyone: “Thank you for having me. What a wonderful crowd.” There was no doubt in what he said. It had been a long wait, and everyone had to and did look good on the dancefloor.