On the Record: The 1975’s Notes on a Conditional Form

I have a bit of a confession to make. I once was a quite (read: very) committed fan of The 1975. In my defence, I was sixteen, and the world has changed quite significantly from the days anyone could sing along to “Oh, I think my boyfriend’s a nihilist” while retaining a shred of dignity. I went to see Matthew Healy and the rest of the band live at the O2, and once listened to Somebody Else in a frenzied state for four consecutive hours the night before my History GCSE. Simpler times.

Now, being a (former) fan of The 1975 should not be as embarrassing as it is. Every other tween/teenage music love-affair is not as cringeworthy. I can happily admit my first concert I went to without my parents was Taylor Swift (Hyde Park, 2015 – I cried), and can tentatively confess to very briefly thinking Harry Styles was the best thing since … well, George Shelley. And yet, The 1975 eclipses even my most repressed, attempted-to-be-forgotten musical crushes. (No, I never was a fan of Jedward, but Union J… remember them?)

The overwhelming embarrassment is primarily a result of the fact that The 1975’s lyrics try so hard to be hyper-intellectual. They sing savage take-downs of celebrity culture, Instagram, and the type of boy who’s a Kerouac fan. By wailing along, you feel a part of Healy’s super-clever-super-cynical-army. But the band courts the media-vapidity and empty intellectualism they have thousands of teenagers singing criticisms of.

Healey, upon accepting the band’s Brit award in 2019, gave a speech condemning misogyny in the music industry. It’s an important issue – but feels flawed coming from the man who only semi-ironically praises a girl “despite your face”. He then went on to tweet that it is “not often a left-leaning band are celebrated”. Ah yes, Lennon, The Pet Shop Boys, Bowie, Adele. Raging Tories the lot of them.

Their new album, Notes on a Conditional Form (2020) was released last month. The eponymous opening track begins with typical electronic notes and synthesised sound before the voice of Greta Thunberg comes in with “We are right now in the beginning of a climate and ecological crisis, and we need to call it what it is”. It’s a powerful message with-or-without the vacuous pop tones underneath, and it is almost guaranteed to give you climate-anxiety-nightmares if you listen to it before you go to sleep. And yet, it is not The 1975’s song; what gives the album’s first moments their power is the calm, moderated voice of Thunberg. She is far more musical than anything else going on. The 1975’s commitment to social and political issues often feels performative – only a week ago, Healy deleted his twitter account after using the Black Lives Matter protests to promote his song – and this feels similar: the band have simply used Thunberg’s words and political capital as an album opener.

The song that immediately follows “The 1975” is “People”. It is different to the band’s normal tone: Healy shouts over “wake up” loud drums and guitars. It could be heard as a “wake up” call to the issues Thunberg raised, but Healy goes on to shout “well, my generation wanna fuck Barack Obama”. Any true climate-related message is left quite confused amidst faux-protest rhetoric.

The rest of the album proceeds in a more classic-The 1975 sound after the first two songs’ difference and politicism. “The End” is a typical instrumental track from the band, and in many ways more interesting than the empty shouts of “People”. It merges into a predictable mediation on fragility in “Frail State of Mind”. The tone fails to change before “Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America” which is a quiet, acoustic song about the problems of both religion and mass incarceration. It would be sensitive and touching if it wasn’t for absolute clangers of lines such a “soil just needs water to be”. Healy is no Dylan.

The best song is “Nothing Revealed / Everything denied”: its piano melodies, less-awkward-than-others-lyrics, and bass just about raise the song above the relentless mediocrity of the rest of the painfully long 22-track album. Notes on a Conditional Form is nowhere as good as the earlier I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware (2016) or the band’s first 2013 release The 1975. In repeatedly mocking sensitivity, celebrity culture, and performative intellectualism whilst continuing to indulge in everything they criticise, the band have become a bizarre parody of themselves, and their music is no longer good enough to rescue them.

That being said, if the first party after lockdown was exclusively playing The 1975’s most exasperating songs, I’d still go. I’d probably even sing along.