Matty Healy, the enfant terrible of pop-rock, pushes his band all-in with a long, messy experiment that just so happens to peak with some of their sharpest songs ever.
The 1975 are distracted. They are drifting in and out of a podcast while reading the news; putting on a movie and spending half of it scrolling through their phones; living through a pandemic while worrying about the death of our planet—all while finding time to post inane memes on Twitter. Like few working bands, the Manchester quartet has made an art out of multitasking. Their albums are big, hyperactive statements that embrace the mechanics of our fragmented minds: half-evolved and half-destroyed, cyborgs acting out base desires. They never tire of sharp juxtapositions—airtight pop songs and meandering interludes, noisy tantrums and orchestral motifs, computerized mayhem and naked confession—because their very essence lies in the whiplash.
If Matty Healy, their 31-year-old frontman and outspoken avatar, had his way, the band’s fourth album, Notes on a Conditional Form, would have arrived mere months after 2018’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships. The goal was to satisfy his own need for constant stimulus: “I watch something on Netflix,” he explained at the time, “and it’s like, ‘That was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. Next?’” It was an exciting proposition considering the myriad breakthroughs of Brief Inquiry: its heartfelt reflections on addiction and recovery, its attempts at generational statements and pop perfection. It was the sound of a band with uncontainable ambition on a creative roll. Like U2 after Achtung Baby or Radiohead after Kid A, they wanted to keep going.
But, well, life happened. They got distracted. Following a series of delays, Notes arrives a full year after its proposed release date and makes no effort to hide its complicated genesis. Written mostly on tour and recorded across 16 different studios, it is the band’s longest and most uncentered album; their funniest and most earnest. It features numerous guest appearances (Phoebe Bridgers, fka twigs, Jamaican reggae DJ Cutty Ranks) and an EP’s worth of tracks with no vocals at all. Just to get to the second actual song, you have to make it through two symphonic pieces—one of which is almost five minutes long and features a sobering speech from climate activist Greta Thunberg—and the early single “People,” a throat-shredding alt-rock manifesto that suggests we might already be doomed.
The album’s remaining 70 minutes are more introspective but no less sprawling: From radiant, thumping dancehall to the barest folk songs Healy has ever sung, Notes ups the ante on every challenge the 1975 have posed since debuting as a polarizing emo band in the early 2010s. It is neither their Zooropa nor their Amnesiac; at times, it doesn’t quite know what it is. But once again, they mostly pull it off. The band’s secret weapon remains drummer and producer George Daniel, who has grown increasingly adept at matching Healy’s every whim as a songwriter. It’s easy to take for granted by now that, no matter what style the 1975 attempt, it will at least sound great. A slapstick country-emo travelogue? Go for it. A shoegaze snippet with Auto-Tuned ad-libs? Why not. A lush, futuristic Americana story-song? Fetch the pedal steel.
From a production standpoint, Notes is their most intricate and impressive work. It seems they have learned the success of a song like “Love It If We Made It” wasn’t just due to Healy’s grand, unifying lyrics: It was the pounding drums, the anxious string arrangement, the sheer momentum that made it not only read like an anthem torn from the headlines but also feel like one. The music on Notes is a narrative unto itself, a spiral into a haywire, alienated mind. “Tonight (I Wish I Was Your Boy)” spills late-night heartbreak to a pitched-up Temptations sample; the exquisite “Frail State of Mind” ascends from glitchy two-step as Healy sings about a loosening sense of security. “Go outside? Seems unlikely,” he sings in its opening lyrics, and, from that transmission, the record only grows more isolated and uncertain.
This sense of solitude unifies the vast changes in production, and even pop turns like “What Should I Say” feel more geared for dimly lit bedrooms than mass gatherings. Healy’s writing takes us to settings that match: alone at the computer, at parties he is desperate to leave, on dates full of boredom and resentment, amid conversations he can’t escape. A verse in the acoustic song “Playing on My Mind” goes as follows:
I met one of your friends
And it was dead nice, he was fine
But he said “Things that interest me exist outside of space and time”
Now I know I should have left it but, who says that?
What a sigh
Earlier in his career, Healy might have been the one babbling on. Nowadays, he seems more interested in observing from the sidelines, lending a familiar, unglamorous intimacy to his portraits of relationships. The couple in “The Birthday Party” bicker about each other’s bathroom habits, while the Britpop rom-com “Me & You Together Song” finds its starring characters smiling through an underwhelming Christmas outing: “It was shit but we were happy.” The most purely romantic moment arrives in the closing “Guys,” where Healy reflects on his friendship with his bandmates, who he’s known since high school. “You’re the love of my life,” he sings sweetly. On an album that spins from societal collapse through personal catastrophe, it is a small, uncomplicated gesture: an unlikely ode to consistency from a songwriter who has spent his career at war with this very notion.
For all its sonic experiments, Notes is filled with these quiet, self-affirming moments. If the 1975’s early work felt like pop music compulsively interrupted with provocations and footnotes, then Notes takes an inverse approach: It is a long, messy experiment that just so happens to peak with some of their sharpest songs. I imagine them piecing the whole thing together like a family moving to a new home, knee-deep in the clutter, where they might come upon a wholesome duet between Healy and his father (“Don’t Worry”), a six-minute extension of the band’s flirtations with UK garage (“Having No Head”), or a self-referential cry into the void about fame (“Everything Revealed / Nothing Denied“). It can feel indulgent. Yes, they have expressed some of these thoughts more succinctly in the past; and yes, the tracklist could be condensed so that you don’t have to clear your schedule to get through it. But when everything clicks, their work has never sounded so patient, so personal.
Take, for example, “If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know),” a late-album highlight and their highest-charting single to date in the UK. Evolving from a slow-building intro into a mechanical chug, it is the record’s closest thing to a typical 1975 song—a glittery ’80s arrangement, a ridiculous saxophone solo, a charmingly sleazy hook. All the while, Healy sings about communing with the camgirl of his dreams. In each verse, he makes his way toward the laptop; in the chorus, he is seduced into a kind of digital heaven. “I need to get back,” he sings with bravado. “I’ve gotta see the girl on a screen.” Is it love? Will it last? Does it matter? Of course not. He’s doomed, as usual. And yet, backed by a band who can transform into whatever symphony blossoms in his head, a group who have settled into a personality so distinctly their own that a hundred genre exercises couldn’t strip it away, Healy seems focused, present in the moment. It sounds a little like devotion.
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