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Mutually supportive community offers a possible alternative: In “The Birthday Party” - an acoustic-driven song that contrasts a lovely, lilting melody with debauched lyrics - he admits, “I depend on my friends to stay clean, as sad as that seems.”Įven with their moments of introspection, previous 1975 albums were feats of extroversion: The yelping, ironic-rock-star missives of a song like the in-your-face “Love Me” from 2015 are directed outward, from an imagined stage to a rapt audience. Drugs and casual sex hover eternally in the background of his id-driven narratives, promising easy escape but echoing hangovers. “Go outside? Seems unlikely,” Healy sings at the beginning of the tender pastoral “Frail State of Mind”(a line that has added resonance now). Like “Love It if We Made It,” a number of these songs are attuned to how the constant threat of global catastrophe (invoked by a Thunberg spoken-word piece that opens the album) has trickled down into the anxious psyches of an entire generation. nighttime record,” its working title was “Music for Cars.” ( He explained further: “in cars smoking weed, Burial and McDonald’s and the M62 and Manchester - just England!”) Indeed, it often has the feel of scanning through late-night radio stations on a never-ending nocturnal drive, moving between the pulsating electronic sounds of “Yeah I Know” and “What Should I Say” and the melodic, Teenage Fanclub-esque fuzz of ’90s throwbacks like “Me & You Together Song” and “Then Because She Goes.” “Notes” largely favors pensive acoustic guitars, bleary-eyed beats and melancholy orchestral flourishes. Previous 1975 records have been long but enlivened with sleek production and sugar-rush hooks. Still, being achingly self-aware and post-post-everything, it has also succinctly summed up the strongest argument against itself in the title of one of its own songs: “Sincerity Is Scary.”Īnd a pretty downcast one, at that. The 1975 toes a precarious line: Any band willing to make earnest pronouncements about The Way We Live Now is constantly risking empty grandeur and songs that age like broken hyperlinks. “Love It if We Made It,” a highlight off its last album, was a lyrical collage of surreal headlines and internet jargon (“Poison me daddy,” Healy sang, with all the force and decontextualized irony of a Jenny Holzer installation) few songs have so potently captured the very particular cocktail of numbness, absurdity and stubborn hope that characterizes the internet age. (“Danny says we’re living in a simulation,” he sang, “but he works in a petrol station.”) Now, a year and a half later, comes the 200-level curriculum: “Notes on a Conditional Form.”Īs the group has evolved beyond the tuneful, glammy emo-pop of its 2013 self-titled debut, the 1975 - Healy, the multi-instrumentalist George Daniel, the guitarist Adam Hann and the bassist Ross MacDonald - has repositioned itself as a band increasingly porous to the historical present and just about every genre of music that exists within it. The bold, eclectic “A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships” from 2018 found the verbose, self-aware frontman Matty Healy moving deftly between arena-sized anthems and confessional ballads, serving up cheeky Twitter-era bons mots on the pitfalls of fame, mortality and contemporary life. The 1975 is a British pop band, not a graduate seminar’s sparsely attended lecture series, though the titles of its most recent albums certainly invite that clarification.