乐队的第二张专辑《Favourite Worst Nightmare》于2007年4月23日发布，这张专辑继承了北极猴的传统，第一周便牢牢占据英国专辑榜榜首。主唱Alex描述专辑与第一张专辑非常不一样，透露其中一些歌曲比较类似第一张专辑中的《From the Ritz to the Rubble》和《The View from the Afternoon》。专辑的全部12首曲目均进入英国单曲top200， 随后作为单曲发行的《Fluorescent Adolescent》更是排名第五，北极猴4名成员全部化装成小丑在BBC著名晚间脱口秀Jonathan Ross Show上进行了该曲目的电视首演。
随着新专辑的发行，北极猴们开始了他们的巡演， 在07年6月22日他们作为主打乐队参与了Glastonbury 音乐节。随后还在柏林，奥斯丁等欧洲音乐节上频频露脸。其中他们在伊比扎岛沙滩旁的演出被太阳报描述为 “这个夏天最棒的摇滚演出”，700人买票入场观看了他们的演出，而其他没能够买到票的乐迷则不得不在沙滩外排着长队，只为一睹北极猴精彩的现场。07年12月17日曼彻斯特阿波罗体育场成为当年北极猴巡演的最后一站，当晚的现场被录制下来做成了DVD,在2008年发行。
第二张专辑的成功帮助北极猴继续在全世界范围内横扫各种奖项，日本，美国都以大奖肯定他们的成绩，英国本土内，英国音乐奖授予他们最佳英国乐队和最佳英国专辑。连续第二次提名水星奖的他们最终败给了Klaxon的《Myths of the Near Future》。
Breathless praise is a time-honored tradition in British pop music, but even so, the whole brouhaha surrounding the 2006 debut of the Arctic Monkeys bordered on the absurd. It wasn't enough for the Arctic Monkeys to be the best new band of 2006; they had to be the saviors of rock & roll. Lead singer/songwriter Alex Turner had to be the best songwriter since Noel Gallagher or perhaps even Paul Weller, and their debut, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, at first was hailed as one of the most important albums of the decade, and then, just months after its release, NME called it one of the Top Five British albums ever. Heady stuff for a group just out of their teens, and they weathered the storm with minimal damage, losing their bassist but not their sense of purpose as they coped in the time-honored method for young bands riding the wave of enormous success: they kept on working. All year long they toured, rapidly writing and recording their second album, Favourite Worst Nightmare, getting it out just a little over a year after their debut, a speedy turnaround by any measure. Some may call it striking when the iron is hot, cashing in while there's still interest, but Favourite Worst Nightmare is the opposite of opportunism: it's the vibrant, thrilling sound of a band coming into its own.
The Arctic Monkeys surely showed potential on Whatever People Say I Am, but their youthful vigor often camouflaged their debt to other bands. Here, they're absorbing their influences, turning their liberal borrowings from the Libertines, the Strokes, and the Jam into something that's their own distinct identity. Unlike any of those three bands, however, the Arctic Monkeys haven't stumbled on their second album; they haven't choked on hubris, they haven't overthought their sophomore salvo, nor have they cranked it out too quickly. That constant year of work resulted in startling growth as the band is testing the limits of what they can do and where they can go. Favourite Worst Nightmare hardly abandons the pleasures of their debut but instead frantically expands upon them. They still have a kinetic nervous energy, but this isn't a quartet that bashes out simply three-chord rock & roll. The Monkeys may start with an infectious riff, but then they'll violently burst into jagged yet tightly controlled blasts of post-punk squalls, or they'll dress a verse with circular harmonies as they do at the end of "Fluorescent Adolescent." Their signature is precision, evident in their concise songs, deftly executed instrumental interplay, and the details within Turner's wry wordplay, which is clever but never condescending. Indeed, the remarkable thing about the Arctic Monkeys — which Favourite Worst Nightmare brings into sharp relief — is their genuine guilelessness, how they restructure classic rock clichés in a way that pays little mind to how things were done in the past, and that all goes back to their youth.
Born in the '80s and raised on the Strokes and the Libertines, they treat all rock as a level playing field, loving its traditions but not seeing musical barriers between generations, since the band learned all of rock history at once and now spit it all out in a giddy, cacophonous blend of post-punk and classic rock that sounds fresh, partially because they jam each of their very songs with a surplus of ideas. Some of this was true on their debut album, but it's the restlessness of Favourite Worst Nightmare that impresses — they're discovering themselves as they go and, unlike so many modern bands, they're interested in the discovery and not appearances. They'll venture into darker territory, they'll slow things down on "Only Ones Who Know," they'll play art punk riffs without pretension. Here, they sound like they'll try anything, which makes this a rougher album in some ways than their debut, which indeed was more cohesive. All the songs on Whatever shared a similar viewpoint, whereas the excitement here is that there's a multitude of viewpoints, all suggesting different tantalizing directions they could go. On that debut, it was possible hear all the ways they were similar to their predecessors, but here it's possible to hear all the ways the Arctic Monkeys are a unique, vibrant band and that's why Favourite Worst Nightmare is in its own way more exciting than the debut: it reveals the depth and ambition of the band and, in doing so, it will turn skeptics into believers.