The 1975 aren’t known for holding back. A maximalist experience by intent, their catalogue is soaked in vivid colour and glorious bombast, continually probing the outermost reaches of their creative sphere. Each album brings a new phase, with their aesthetic altering, shifting, and evolving in rapid currents and tributaries. That central thread, however, remains: a yearning for 110%.
With new album ‘Being Funny In A Foreign Language’ incoming, the band have begun flirting with different details. The full tracklisting is online, prompting clues, and no small degree of speculation. A few moments ago lead single ‘Part Of The Band’ went online and its… remarkably subtle, extremely restrained, and – if anything – highly nuanced.
Acoustic in tone, the choppy strings line up against Matty Healy’s blurred vocal, the words tumbling over one another. Ah yes, the words: that’s where the colour lies, this time round.
Never a writer to dull his pen, ‘Part Of The Band’ manages to criss-cross between Verlaine, Rimbaud, and ejaculating in a woman’s hand. Toying with cancellation and “verbal propellants”, he references baristas “sitting in east on their Communista keisters…”
There’s largesse, too. Painfully self-aware, ‘Part Of The Band’ features some typical Healey introspection, such as his questioning line: “Am I ironically woke? The butt of my joke?”
Yet at heart, it’s one of their most straight-forward, heart-on-sleeve moments. Baroque in its arrangement, floral in its tone, ‘Part Of The Band’ toys with the absurd only to end up revelling in normality. Shorn of the laser-sighted synths, the hyper-intense production, The 1975 seem able to locate another form of expression. Even when it toys with the sincere, though, they manage to veer into the surreal – the outro, for example, doubling back on itself, discussing Orwellian group-think and potential video ideas. The 1975, then: never knowingly understood.
Words: Robin Murray
