It felt like curation of 10 years worth of work, and we decided to not waste the big album session and make a big fucking record. “Doing a first album didn’t feel like a first album. “The first album was very much executed in a different way to any of our other records,” he says, noting that a through line of “glitchiness, weirdness” is heard across their early EPs and latter three records. That sound was an “anomaly,” per Healy’s description, in their own musical vision, though tinges of it have popped up on every following release, most notably on Notes‘s glitzy, Duran Duran-esque single “ If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know).” It literally means nothing.”ĭoing the opposite of what’s expected has long been Healy’s M.O., going back to the 1975’s 2013 self-titled debut - a sparkling, maximalist pop-rock production that locked the group into a wave of Eighties New Wave nostalgia. Notes on a Conditional Form is the opposite of that. I gave them a framework of understanding that they could hang their opinions off of. “ was to control people’s perception of the record,” Healy says. Even the name of the new album is meant in part to “subvert” any expectation of clean, tidy finality set up by the previous record’s title. Intentionally long and winding, it’s meant to complement but not resolve their more direct, cohesive 2018 release A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships. Notes is already proving to be the 1975’s most divisive endeavor yet.
He’d rather focus on “longform statements” like the 1975’s albums, and cut back on everything else: “I’ll write my lyrics, and you decide if you want to listen to them or not.” Not too long after we hang up, Healy makes a few jokes on Twitter and shares some memes about fans going to “ 1975 jail” for listening to the leak, but he doesn’t say anything about the blowback to “Roadkill.” After years of successfully getting attention for his music by making outrageous statements in any platform that will have him, he’s learned that tweets are not his preferred mode of expression. You don’t get to take that experience away from me.” “A drunk conservative guy called me a fag. “The context of that line is that my personal experience was as an effeminate gay-rights activist with long hair, a skirt, and a rainbow t-shirt, in an airport in middle America late at night,” he says. As he continues to explain this latest controversy, he doubles down on his lyrical intent.