Review: The 1975’s Sprawling Notes on a Conditional Form Is a Sincere Ode to Rock

The album solidifies the band as the boldest purveyors of something resembling what we used to call rock.

The 1975, Notes on a Conditional Form
Photo: Interscope Records

The 1975 has always defied easy categorization as a “rock” band, even while dominating the rock charts. Singer, lyricist, and expert provocateur Matty Healy—frequently seen with tongue planted not firmly in cheek, but literally jutting out at his audience—is wholly unconcerned with genre distinctions. The band’s fourth album, the 22-track, 80-minute opus Notes on a Conditional Form, is sprawling in every sense, jarringly and unapologetically moving from activist monologue to orchestral swells to jittery dubstep to emo to ’80s soft-rock pastiche and back again—which is its own rock-star fuck-you flex.

That the album works at all is a kind of miracle. While Healy has tended to hide behind an ironic postmodernist guise, he now lets his ambition and sincerity openly roam, sitting uncomfortably alongside more familiar sides of his personality. The customary self-titled opening track, which on previous albums has incorporated the same lyrics riffing on a blowjob, is here a platform for teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg, a kindred spirit for Healy, if one with much more serious aims. It would be annoyingly didactic if her argument that mankind’s survival truly is a black-or-white question weren’t put in such forcible and moving terms, and if the band members didn’t wisely step away with only muted backing instruments.

The opener is followed by the whopping noise of “People,” a punk piss-take in which Healy can’t help cracking wise with his own state-of-the-world one-liner: “Well, my generation wanna fuck Barack Obama/Living in a sauna with legal marijuana,” which is both absurd and, at least if you’ve spent time around certain regulars at a sleek Los Angeles weed dispensary, not an untrue characterization of his peers. That kind of half-winking, half-serious satire is both what puts off some listeners and is vital to understanding what makes Healy so refreshing in a musical environment that has calcified into self-seriousness. Along with his sonic omnivorousness, it begs for comparisons to Damon Albarn, Healy’s clearest predecessor.

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For all his antics, Healy can be disarmingly blunt, even sobering. “The Birthday Party” sees him amusingly coping with his ongoing addiction issues at a lame gathering where a group of girls suggest taking Adderall because it supposedly won’t lead to him cheating. On the brazenly titled “Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America,” he duets with openly bisexual emo-folk singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers in a poignant exploration of closeted love. Elsewhere, the album’s stripped-down closer, “Guys,” is a sweet ode to his affection for his bandmates.

A quintessential 1975 song, “If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)” packs all of Healy’s contradictory lyrical tics into a shimmering melodic powerhouse, suggesting a rewrite of a Hall & Oates song for the FaceTime generation. “I see you online…all the time,” Healy moans to a female crush before stripping off his clothes at the girl’s suggestion. (The vocals get an assist from FKA twigs, Healy’s rumored real-life girlfriend, for added self-awareness.) Is Healy parodying sax solo-spewing rock of the past or honoring it? Is he mocking his own romantic trials, or genuinely seeking a uniquely 21st-century love? The answer is a bit of everything—a maximalism that the 1975 pulls off like almost no one else.

Even a prankster like Albarn in his most aggressively divergent later work wouldn’t stuff a double album with as many interludes and sketches as this one. Its wide-open freedom is also its biggest weakness: The album’s first stretch is slowed down by pretty but redundant instrumentals. For one, “Yeah I Know” is a nonsensical electronic studio experiment (“Pick a card…hit that shit” are among its few words) that never really takes off.

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More successful curveballs include the gospel-rap anthem “Nothing Revealed/Everything Denied” and the admirably off-kilter, if a bit confounding, “Shiny Collarbone,” which features dancehall artist Cutty Ranks. It might not live up to its lofty goals, but the sheer amount of daring on Notes on a Conditional Form solidifies the four guitar-wielding dudes of the 1975 as the biggest, boldest, and brashest purveyors of something resembling what we used to call rock ‘n’ roll, which, as Healy knows well, was always at least as much a pose as a sound. He wears it well.

Score: 
 Label: Interscope  Release Date: May 22, 2020  Buy: Amazon

Paul Schrodt

Paul Schrodt is a freelance writer and editor living in Los Angeles and covering entertainment. He’s contributed to Esquire, GQ, Men’s Health, The Wall Street Journal, The Hollywood Reporter, Los Angeles magazine, and others.

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