The 1975’s singer Matthew Healy is unshy about addressing his foibles in songs, often in an ironic tone that conveys impish pride. He also has a booster’s way with superlatives. “I want people to look back and think our records were the most important pop records that a band put out in this decade,” he said in 2017. Such statements have proved intolerable to sceptics, the puffery of a jumped-up pop-rock act from well-heeled Cheshire. But chart-topping success on either side of the Atlantic has backed up the boosterism.
Their fifth album, Being Funny in a Foreign Language, teams them with US super-producer Jack Antonoff, who has worked with Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey and Lorde. His stature matches The 1975’s vision of where they belong in the pecking order. But the results, at almost half the length of 2020’s sprawling Notes on a Conditional Form, scale back their usual high level of ambition.
Opening track “The 1975” gloms onto the minimalist rhythms of LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends”, an era-defining song from 2007, one of Healy’s favourites. His lyrics survey a world of internet addiction, conspiracy theories, intoxication, betrayed youth and self-commodification. But the tour d’horizon narrows as the album progresses.
The style of music re-embraces the vibrant 1980s sound of their earliest work, before slowing things down in the latter stages with a series of break-up songs, ending with the saccharine “When We Are Together”. Love is the main topic, with Healy swapping his previously raffish persona for that of a less risky romantic lead. “I’ve been suicidal, you’ve been gone for weeks,” he sings in “Oh Caroline”, before thinking better of it: “Getting suicidal? Honestly not for me.” The sense of skating over emotional depths is heightened by the song’s delightfully easy soft-rock groove.
“Human Too” manages to be grand and intimate at the same time, a tender ballad in which Healy apologises to a lover while claiming, with a straight face rather than deflective irony, that he represents flawed humanity. But elsewhere the stakes have been lowered. If The 1975’s previous albums were all-in wagers, then this one plays it safer.
★★★☆☆
‘Being Funny in a Foreign Language’ is released by Dirty Hit
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