In a very The 1975-ish bit of meta self-reference, I’ll be honest: when I volunteered to write this piece it was mostly to point out that Matty Healy is wrong, and not in the ways you might think. Specifically, Healy was wrong in February last year, when he ranked The 1975’s own albums on Twitter/X. (He put the self-titled last, for god’s sake.)
You might reasonably ask: Isn’t all art inherently subjective? Can an artist’s appraisal of their own creative output really be wrong? The answer to both questions is: yes.
How wrong exactly? Well, until the band finishes its sixth studio album—Healy has teased ‘GHEMB’, which online sleuths believe stands for ‘God has entered my body’, and hinted at new collaborations with Japanese House and Lorde producer Jim-E Stack—let us count the ways.
Disclaimer: this doesn’t include live albums, because they don’t count.
5. Notes On A Conditional Form (2020)
If there’s an album that most exemplifies the contradictions of The 1975, it’s the impossibly sprawling Notes: 22 songs of such wild and incongruent style that it becomes overbearing. Opening on a Greta Thunberg speech, jumping immediately into a screamo-punk song, then segueing into an ambient instrumental? Sure. Supposedly recorded in 15 different studios over 19 months, Notes really does at times feel like an assemblage of half-formed ideas and fragments of other works, shuffled by the algorithm. It’s undeniably, intimidatingly inventive—whether it’s in stripped-down acoustic settings, lo-fi ambience, or full-on house—and in so many ways, its disorienting effect feels intentional: after all, what is life online but a constant, disorienting, contextless churn? At its best, Notes is gorgeous: the pared-back heartbreak of “Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America”, the expansive gospel backing of “Nothing Revealed, Everything Denied”. And “If You’re Too Shy”—the band’s relentlessly groovy ode to falling in love with a cam girl—remains among the perfect 1975 songs.
4. I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it (2016)
