Reviewed by Ian Phillips.
By The 1975, Dirty Hit/Sony Music 2020.
The 1975 are one of my new favourite bands because they don’t just make very good, sophisticated, music they also make me think.
Notes On A Conditional Form (NOACF) is their fourth album and follows 2018’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships.
The album titles alone start the thinking process.
NOACF begins with the voice of Greta Thunberg set to a gently building musical backdrop of the band’s theme song outlining the climatic dangers facing the world and calling on us to act.
The album then takes a dramatic musical shift as front-man Matty Healy screams ‘Wake Up People’ as the band launches into a frenzied thrashing punk track designed to rouse us from our slumbers.
And then the music shifts again as we are soothed by an instrumental piece, The End (Music For Cars) which leads us into Frail State Of Mind, a song that is built around an intricate percussive framework.
One of the interesting things about The 1975 is their eclecticism.
They’ve drawn from a wide and varied palette of sounds and genres to produce the songs on NOACF.
The tracks vary from the punk/garage urgency of People to the dreamy synth-scapes of The End to the indie-pop of Frail State Of Mind and on to the experimental electronica of Yeah I Know all stacked back to back on the disc.
Matty Healy says that the album is about “the now – about art that reflects the world and the band at the point of creation”.
The songs confront us with our own ennui on the personal scale while presenting us with imminent global climatic disaster on the other hand.
It’s an album of deliberate opposites, one that is not written to delight and amuse but rather to provoke a response.
Consequently it requires several listens to unfold.
NME has stated that – “The 1975 have made the album at the end of the world.”
And Clash Magazine added – “They’re about to save the world again.”
I’ll leave the last word to Matty Healy when commenting on Greta Thunberg’s involvement – “To have that voice and sentiment on the record, I couldn’t think of anybody more powerful.”
This is a complex album that deserves the accolades it has received.
