Pop music, once ruled by constraint and conformity, now faces a tyranny of freedom. Technology has eroded boundaries of taste and influence, cracking open a trove of stylistic opportunity. No mainstream act has embraced this freedom more wholeheartedly than the 1975, a group from Britain that could loosely be classified as a band, if only because its members sometimes play instruments. The group was formed, in the early two-thousands, as a teen-age punk cover band but has morphed into a genre-defying shape that poses a series of questions: Where does nostalgia end and innovation begin? What counts as rock and roll, and why should anyone care? What’s the difference between ambition and self-indulgence? Is self-awareness an asset or a cross to bear?
The 1975 has four members, but its front man, a charismatic thirty-one-year-old named Matty Healy, assumes the responsibility of addressing these questions—and then he asks more. Rock music has all but disappeared from pop culture, but the mythology of the rock star looms large, and Healy embodies the archetype. Scrawny and outspoken, with a thicket of wild black hair and a love of eyeliner, illicit substances, and shirtlessness, he’s become an avatar of modern authenticity, wit, and flamboyance—someone unfiltered and agile enough to spar with Maroon 5 on a public platform. The 1975 functions as a vessel for his ponderings about the psychic burdens of millennials, and the self-loathing he feels for even bothering to talk about them. (Healy has described himself, a bit sheepishly, as “a millennial that baby boomers like.”)
The band’s first three albums showed an impressive ability to metabolize musical styles and eras, but even more dazzling was the attitudinal tap dance that Healy performed in his lyrics. He could harshly critique the preferences and habits of an entire generation while implicating himself in the same breath. “You lack substance when you say something like ‘Oh what a shame,’ ” he sings, on “Sincerity Is Scary,” from 2018. “It’s just a self-referential way that stops you having to be human.”
At first, the band worked mostly within the parameters of pop rock, writing big-tent anthems that drew heavily on eighties synth-pop, filled with kick drums and clever hooks—a default mode for plenty of mainstream musicians who can’t rap convincingly. Gradually, the group began to take stylistic digressions, with the same sort of imaginative confidence that David Byrne and the Talking Heads had in the late seventies. The 1975 buffered its hooks with gospel choirs, funky bass lines, glitchy electronic noodling, and flushes of psychedelia. Healy, at his most existentially confused, still sounded exuberant and warm-blooded, never exhausted by the intellectual and emotional loop-de-loops he made in his lyrics. He knew how to write hooks, and how to be sentimental without being treacly. And if he did come off as treacly he could find the appropriate way to make fun of himself for it.
Each of the 1975’s first three records topped the British charts, in part because the group cultivated an uncommonly sincere bond with its fans, a cross-section of whom appeared in the video for the single “TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME,” from 2018. The band’s ostentatiously titled album “I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it” débuted at No. 1 in the United States in 2016, even though it wasn’t made available on Spotify until two weeks later. Healy, in a quest to imbue every aspect of his work with cinematic importance, said that the band would quit making records when the decade ended. But after recording their ambitious “A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships,” in 2018, he found that there was more to say.
When the 1975 toured last fall to promote “A Brief Inquiry,” crowds often cheered for encores. In response, Healy would return to the stage alone, stand with his back to the audience, and broadcast a five-minute speech by the teen-age climate activist Greta Thunberg. “I ask you to please wake up and make the changes required possible,” she says. “To do your best is no longer good enough.” The band’s first three albums begin with an ambient instrumental track simply called “The 1975.” For its new record, “Notes on a Conditional Form,” which was released last week, the 1975 instead chose a talk by Thunberg—which was recorded specifically for this purpose but is indistinguishable from any number of her viral sermons. The speech segues neatly into a song called “People,” a screeching manifesto that nods to the band’s punk-rock origins. “Wake up, wake up, wake up!” Healy screams. “It’s Monday morning and we’ve only got a thousand of them left.” It’s a song about the frenzy of dispiriting news that Healy and his generational peers have encountered, and the way that apathy can appear as the only reasonable path forward.
But Healy is too conflicted, and too resistant to cliché, to make a pure protest album. “Notes on a Conditional Form” is not, despite its opening moments, a political record. On much of the album, he takes a more resigned stance, his voice slipping into a whisper rather than his trademark wail. And he’s more inclined to probe the sense of inertia that threatens to undermine serious political action among young people—a kind of ennui disguised as comfort, thanks to the trivial conveniences that technology offers. After many years of struggling with heroin abuse, Healy spent a stint in rehab while recording “A Brief Inquiry.” He’s since suffered a short relapse and got clean again, and on the new album he wrestles with the tedium of sobriety, describing the sensation of arriving at social gatherings only to wish he was back at home. Yet Healy is also too skeptical of his own internal monologue to make anything that could be described as a recovery album. “Now I’m clean,” he announces on “The Birthday Party,” a drowsy acoustic song with some of the conversational spoken-word touches found in many threads of modern country music. “It would seem.”
“Notes on a Conditional Form” sometimes functions as a self-referential corrective to earlier records, disputing claims that Healy has made about his life. The opening line of “Love It if We Made It,” an electro-rock hit from 2018, said that Healy was “fucking in a car, shooting heroin.” Now, on “Nothing Revealed Everything Denied,” he sings, “Life feels like a lie / I need something to be true. . . . I never fucked in a car, I was lying.” Musically, too, this album diverges from the band’s prior work. They once assimilated their influences into a cogent, ecstatic form of synth-pop, but now these individual styles appear more or less preserved as discrete entities, the band shape-shifting from song to song. And if Healy once represented a globalist version of pop music, drawing more from social media than from regional sentiment, he’s refocussed himself on his homeland, offering a survey of distinctly British subgenres: shoe-gazey Britpop, rousing punk, skittering jungle, and ragga. More than blind experimentation, this is a gesture of faith in the 1975’s fans, who are eager to follow Healy down any path he chooses to take.
Healy has so many ideas—and so many rejoinders and addenda to those ideas—that the 1975’s albums, at times, suffer from a lack of editing. (Or did they benefit from it? one can imagine Healy pondering.) All the records are lengthy and grandiloquent, but “Notes on a Conditional Form,” with twenty-two tracks, crosses a new threshold. This excess used to be a matter of lyrical verbosity and an abundance of restless energy, but Healy has a newfound reserve that occasionally veers into sluggishness. There are a number of tracks—movie-score instrumentals, electronic-dance interludes—that do not contain his voice at all. Once a bottomless well of questions, Healy sounds, faintly, as if he’d grown tired of his own contemplation. Which leads only to more contemplation: Is this the sound of growing up? What’s the difference between maturity and complacency? Is compromise a form of defeat? Is irreverence the same thing as innovation? Healy, you can be sure, has already begun drafting the answers. ♦
