Matty Healy, the lead singer of The 1975, is experiencing somewhat spotty service. The musician, 31, has been quarantining with his bandmate George Daniel since March, but when Healy and I speak, he is driving around the English countryside. On May 22, the band is releasing their fourth album, Notes On A Conditional Form, originally scheduled for February 21, and then April 24. The 22-track release was recorded a year ago, while the band was on tour, and so far, promoting an album with stay-at-home orders in place hasn’t been easy.
Founded seventeen years ago in Manchester, England, The 1975 came of age during the Internet Era, with plenty of growing pains along the way. Their eponymous debut album, released in 2013, garnered attention for its relatable angst backdropped with 80s synth-pop melodies, while in their last, A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships from 2018, the band meditated on the now. Take “Love It If We Made It,” a song Pitchfork called “a generational anthem” for its raw authenticity; Healy stripped headlines straight from the news, and transformed them into lyrical mementos.
Their current sound is hard to condense into a single genre, especially with the mix of ambient noise, orchestrated strings, screamo vocals, and gospel choir backings that feature on Notes. But it’s their very musical idiosyncrasy that makes The 1975 resonate. “It’s just like a mirror—that’s all I want my records to be, a mirror to myself,” Healy says. “I really don’t think that I’m special. I think that if I hold a mirror up to myself, I have to be holding a mirror up to lots of other people.”
Ahead of the release of Notes, Healy spoke to Vogue about vulnerability; his revised definition of punk rock; and his new quarantine buddy, a puppy called Mayhem.
Why do you feel that this album is the right conclusion to the Music For Cars era for The 1975? The release date kept being pushed back, and now Notes is set to come out during this uncertain time.
I think it fits because it doesn’t really do what life promises it [will]. Like Notes doesn’t really provide a kind of a result. It doesn’t really put a ribbon on anything … I think it’s a bit like the end of The Graduate, which is like my favorite ending of a movie ever! They run away and they have the whole romantic thing and it’s beautiful and it’s cinematic and it’s ideal. And then the camera lingers on them as they’re driving away on the bus, [there are] all of these questions that you start asking: Where are they going? Have they got any money? What are they going to do tomorrow? … I think that this record is like that, as well. There’s moments like [the song] “Guys,” where they look back and it’s quite retrospective. But there’s still a search and a yearning and I think that our records are always defined by that. So they’re always looking forward, inherently.