Being Funny in a Foreign Language, the 1975’s fifth album, was born from reflection. After the band noticed that the new music they were working on felt like an extension of their last record, 2020’s Notes on a Conditional Form, they stopped to reconsider. “That elicited a bit of a downer,” says band leader Matty Healy, “which then elicited loads of conversations that we just hadn’t had in years.” They started to brainstorm: What is the 1975? What does the 1975 look like out of your peripheral vision? What would a 1975 Halloween costume be? “It’s black and white. Let’s admit that it’s black and white,” Healy says. “And it’s front man–centric. Not to put me at the front, but it is. It’s poppy. And it’s memorable songs.”
Then there were Healy’s personal reflections. The band’s lyricist began writing the album during the first break from touring he had in nearly a decade, thanks to the pandemic, and while staying away from Twitter, where provocative statements could get him in trouble. With the time to think, he wrote some of the 1975’s most mature songs, about his own relationships (including a recent split from FKA Twigs, which is alluded to multiple times on the record) and the culture at large. Yes, the cheeky lyrics about dicks and internet trends are still there — the band turned heads by announcing their return with the lyrics of “Part of the Band,” including a line about “vaccinista tote-bag-chic baristas.” But they take a back seat to the album’s more sincere moments, from the starry-eyed “I’m in Love With You” to “About You,” an epic ballad to rival “Somebody Else” and “Robbers.”
The result feels like a distillation of everything that has made the 1975 one of the most influential bands of the past decade. While they brought in an outside producer, Jack Antonoff, for the first time to polish things off, Healy was insistent on retaining control over his lyrics. (His voice even comes through in the lines provided to press, which feature intentionally placed quotation marks and copious exclamation points.) Sprawled out and smoking a joint on a video call, Healy is eager to discuss lines from the album, often singing them to himself to jog his memory. He even asks to talk about one more song, “Looking for Somebody (to Love),” at the end of the interview.
“The 1975”
I’m sorry about my 20s — I was learning the ropes / I had a tendency of thinking about it after I spoke.
What did you mean by that?
Well, I definitely didn’t mean “I’m sorry” genuinely, because I’m not. Even though we’ve always made records two years apart, the two years this time happened to be separated with COVID. And so we experienced the same amount of introspection and self-reflection as anybody else but for the first time in like a decade. So when we started making it, the working title was At Their Very Best. It was like we knew that we were in better shape in general: philosophically, intellectually, creatively. I think my records have always been defined by this searching — for love, or meaning, or even sometimes just a drug of some kind.
So I was offline for two years essentially, but I was still a witness to what was going on. And the reason that I came off Twitter was obviously in the wake of some kind of cancellation, but it was cancellation No. 50 or something, so it wasn’t actually that that provoked it. I just thought, I want to be a really good writer on the cultural war, and I don’t think I can objectively write about it if I’m participating in it. Or especially becoming a pawn in it, which is almost what was starting to happen.
And then I would reflect on things that I’d said in the moment, and it’s that whole thing of I’ll make an album that I’ll spend two years thinking about every single fucking word — I’ll die on the hill of every line — but then I would just tweet something that I hadn’t thought about properly. I just felt like a bit of a paradox.
Do you think entering your 30s had anything to do with reflecting?
Yeah, massively. When I was growing up in the ’90s, the coolest people in culture were my age. Everyone was early 30s, late 20s — that was the aspirational thing. So I’ve always quite looked forward to this age because the artists that I looked up to, they tended to be where I was now, that balance between youth and wisdom. My work and my 20s happened at the same time and are defined by the same thing: essentially postmodernism. So all of the tropes: addiction, individualism, fucking narcissism, nihilism. And that’s all very cool and sexy and appropriate and fun in your 20s. But when you start to move out of that period of your life, ideas like family? Responsibility? Community? More kind of modernist ideas start to creep into your life. And I think that some people are afraid to approach them because they’re not as sexy as, like, I got drugs all over myself during a threesome that I hated or some shit like that. Now, I think there was an element of just growing up that you can hear in the record across it — the way we did it, why we did it, how it sounds.
“Happiness”
I’m happiest when I’m doing something that I know is good / That’s happiness for me.
These lines are like this accidental sample of yourself. How did that come together?
I was reaching out to a lot of different producers, and one of my favorites on Spotify was this person called DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ. They’re a duo, and they started sending me music. They sent me this demo called “Happiness,” and it has the proto-identity of that song but without all the 1975-ness. And that sample was in there, and I always loved it because I thought it’s interesting. Then, after we cut the record, we were listening to it at different tempos. As it got higher, it got closer to recognizing my own voice and then I realized that was my — I wouldn’t call it a “quote,” but maybe that’s why I resonated with it, because it’s me.
What about that statement made it stick out to you?
Something about it was just quite charming. Then I was like, For fuck’s sake — people are going to start thinking that I’m sampling myself, self-mythologizing. That wasn’t my intention at all. Stuff like that, stuff that made me nervous and made me feel a bit self-aware, that’s different to the shit that made me feel self-aware and nervous when I was in my 20s. Earnestness is way harder; sincerity is harder than irony. I’m talking about happiness versus purpose, because everyone talks about life being about happiness, whereas I think life’s about purpose. Give me purpose over happiness. I’ll do anything in the pursuit of purpose, and I don’t know why. It’s the same reason that I said, “Just tell me you love me / That’s all that I need to hear,” instead of “I pissed myself on a Texan intersection.” I’m trying to be not so sardonic.
Listening to this album, there are these super-earnest moments backed up against some songs that are more tongue in cheek. Did you ever think about fully separating that and making an album that was just no jokes?
That’s the first time I’ve ever thought about that separation. I’ve definitely realized that there was a time and a place on each song. I was even challenged on that when I was making “I’m in Love With You.” The guys could hear me in the vocal booth trying to find a word that would negate the sentimentality a little bit. Maybe “I’m not in love with you” or “I’m not quite in love with you” or something to give it that 1975, not-so-sweet [feeling]. And they were like, “Dude, the whole thing that you’re doing at the moment is being in the present. If it sounds like the song’s called ‘I’m in Love With You,’ write a song called ‘I’m in Love With You’ about being in love with you.”
“Part of the Band”
I know some “vaccinista tote-bag-chic baristas” sitting in east on their communista keisters / writing about their ejaculations.
From a craft angle, how do you actually write a verse like that? Is it a lot of polishing, or does it spill out all at once and just work?
I think I’ve gotten better at finding words. It’s rhyming, at the end of the day. You know, Dr. Seuss was great at it; you’ve got to be able to do the rhyme. I think that’s what I’m quite good at as well, but without it being like, Oh God, eye-rolling rhymes. I do like a rhyme. “Vaccinista tote-bag-chic baristas” — well, I was living in East London at the time, so if you live in the east of any city, you know who I’m talking about.
Do you know the song “Chocolate”? The song “Chocolate” is essentially how I write. I basically scat. So over that rhythm, I was going [sings mumbly], “Call it a spliff because you know that you will.” I did all the rhymes and the rhythms that had words. It didn’t really have lyrics. I made a bit of a shape. I still write the same way. So I will have been going [sings mumbly], “I know some vaccinista, dun-dun —” Okay, “vaccinista”; that’s funny. And then I was like, What rhymes? And then I’m trying to picture a person, and they tend to be baristas. I couldn’t fit “blue hair” in there. I did find it easier this album. It did flow a little bit more.
It seems of a piece with “Love It If We Made It,” but not quite as incendiary.
I think that all of my records may be — from now, probably — you could say, a continuation from A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships. Because I think that album is when I found my voice as a writer, or I found my subject matter, which is consumption via the internet. Because the 1975 has been my journal and it’s been so dynamic, it’s been very difficult for me to decipher exactly what we are or what I am at a particular time. I recognize that that is always part of my expression: talking about the ever-increasing culture war around me.
“I’m in Love With You”
You show me your Black-girl thing, pretending that I know what it is (I wasn’t listening) / I apologize; you meet my eyes / Yeah, it’s simple, and it goes like this.
Fans could look at this and read it as a specific detail about you. What made you want to write that directly?
Everyone always asks what my advice is, and my advice is don’t overintellectualize your art. If you have an idea, and that seems like the idea, you can sit there for five days and think why and ask people if it’s a good idea, but then you’ll never make the art. So what I tend to do is write the line. And then if I want to pull it out because I’m scared of it or it’s touching on something that is maybe culturally sensitive or politically sensitive, then those are the lines that I always leave in. When I write a line that I think, That’s just so hyperspecific to me, that’s the first tattoo that a kid gets. So the more specific you think you’re being, the more universal you’re being.
Also, you write a line and you think it’s about something, but putting out music’s like going to therapy. You go into therapy and you go, “This is how I feel, and this is what that means.” And your therapist goes, “Are you sure you don’t feel like this? And are you sure that it doesn’t mean that?” So when your audience says to you, “I interpreted it like this — could it not have been?,” then you start thinking, Fuck. Maybe actually, yeah, that is what the line’s about.
That specific line is about, in the grips of love, the differences of — I think I’m saying, “I don’t care about whatever culturally specific thing is happening right now; I just fucking love you.” [Laughs.] And that’s what love feels like. Maybe it came out because of the conversation about race, and we’re always having these political conversations all the time, and because I was writing about how insignificant any detail is once you are in love with somebody. Maybe that’s why I was drawn to put that line in there about my Black girlfriend at the time.
“All I Need to Hear”
Oh, I don’t care if you’re insincere / Just tell me what I want to hear.
We’ve been talking about sincerity, and in recent interviews, you talked about it being a challenge for you and wanting to lean into that. Can you expand on that?
It’s so much easier, especially as an English northern person, to be sardonic in the face of something sincere than it is to lean into the sincerity of it. It’s way easier to make a joke or, as we say, take the piss. I take the piss out of everything, and normally I do it because that’s how I like to live my life. But I have to admit, if I’m an adult, that sometimes it’s to protect myself from looking like a dick, because that’s what we’re really scared of: We’re scared of embarrassing ourselves; we’re scared of opening ourselves up and that not being good.
I’m not trying to make a meal out of this idea of “Listen, I’ve said something sincere on a fucking song.” But what I’m saying is that people used to ask me, “Why would you say this about yourself? Why would you describe yourself in this way?” I was like, “Because that’s not hard. Because people like people …” That’s what stand-up comedy is: Stand-up comedians are the underdog who go onstage, make a joke about themselves, and you like them because of that. That’s all I’ve ever done, and that’s easy. What’s harder is to go up onstage and say something that you mean, and it not have a punch line, and it may be attempting to deliver some moral message. Which is a bit lofty and maybe a bit pretentious if you think that you have the ability to do that. It’s scary, when you don’t think that you’re Leonard Cohen, to try and be.
When you’re writing a song like that, and the sentiment at the heart of it is pretty simple and the lyrics aren’t that flashy, how do you know when that works?
You always want a song to get as close to a cover as possible. And that’s the first thing that George said to me. He said, “That sounds like a cover.” It sounds like a song that has always existed because it’s the sentiment that’s always existed. It’s probably my most successful exercise ever, because I did try and do that. It did come out of me naturally, but my intention was to write something where every line was great and not funny, because great and funny are very, very different. I wanted it to be a great song because I just needed to do that for me at the time, with Notes on a Conditional Form and stuff like that. I’m doing this for me, so all of this proving myself is for me, really.
“About You”
There was something about you that now I can’t remember / It’s the same damn thing that made my heart surrender / And I’ll miss you on a train / I’ll miss you in the morning / I never know what to think about — so think about you.
This bridge ends up being sung by Carly Holt, your bandmate Adam Hann’s wife. How did that come to be?
I think the whimsy and the naïveté in that song come from the fact that it was going to be a Drive Like I Do song. I wasn’t thinking about the profundity of it, or I wasn’t thinking about fitting it into a record. I was just thinking about it being quite pure and blissful. Just practically, what happened was that I didn’t like that bridge. I wrote a bunch of different bridges.
Michelle from Japanese Breakfast had sung on “Part of the Band,” and I remembered that moment of — I’ve done it a few times, but sometimes one of the revelations is, Maybe it’s just the voice; it’s not the part. So when Carly sang it, it was like, Okay, yeah, the part’s great — just I shouldn’t have been singing that. What we didn’t want to do is have a feature. We hadn’t really done a feature before in a 1975 album because I think that would take — well, Phoebe pops up on one of our records, but me and Phoebe kind of orbit each other: She’s in our music video; I turn up and I open up for her shows. So that felt real. What wouldn’t feel real is if Bad Bunny turned up on track ten or something. We wanted to keep it in the family.
Having that guest changes the meaning of the song, in turning it into this conversation. After you wrote this from one perspective, tell me more about hearing those lines in the bridge as something being said back to you rather than just a continuation of what you’re saying.
I’m used to it a little bit because I am famous for “she said.” And what “she said” a lot of the time does is allow me to take one of my criticisms of myself and have a way of giving it to myself. If I place this criticism within the context of a relationship — so “She said you’re full of diseases / Her eyes were full of regret,” whatever it may be — it sounds more prosaic if it’s me.
I had different lyrics, and then I got Carly to sing the lyrics, and then I changed the lyrics. Once I did hear her say “There was something about you that now I can’t remember,” I was like, Okay, it’s a call-and-response. But that was just finessing conjunctions and nouns and first-person, third-person stuff. The sentiment was there; I knew what I needed her to say.
“When We Are Together”
“I’m better at writing” was just a way to get you biting; oh, the truth is that our egos are absurd / I thought we were fighting, but it seems I was “gaslighting” you. I didn’t know that it had its own word.
That sticks out to me for something that you were just talking about, about airing your own criticisms. This album feels different than before, in that there are these moments when you’re just admitting fault.
Like a lot of people, I’d been in a relationship in the pandemic; I’d just come out of the relationship. And I’m in the studio putting down this really raw thing. I was like, Fuck it. I was just writing, which is why there’s too many lines about being canceled on the record. I don’t care about the cancel thing, and I knew I needed to make a joke about it, but if you make too many jokes, it becomes “The lady doth protest too much.” I forgot about the canceled line [on “Part of the Band”], so I put another one in “When We Are Together” because it was such a good fucking rhyme. Then I listened to the whole album back, I was like, Oh fuck. People are going to think that I really care about the cancel thing.
If you are an artist like me, your partners tend to be from your world. So I’ve been with writers, and I don’t know if there’s an element of competition, but the truth is that both of you are fucking writers so you’re both a nightmare. And the gaslighting line is an interesting one because there’s some lines on the album where I’m really, really challenging these concepts. The language of gaslighting, I think, has actually been good. It can send arguments down a never-ending spiral, but that was a true thing that I was saying. I wasn’t like, “Oh, I didn’t know that I was gaslighting you. Sorry.” I was like, “Oh shit — I didn’t know there was a word for that. Now that you’ve said that back to me, I’ve realized I do do that a bit.” In an argument, we all do — you can’t not have done it. It’s a defense mechanism. I’m in a lot of therapy (I enjoy therapy), so I try to be quite objective. If I notice a behavior in me — I’m also an ex-junkie, so I have to be on top of my behavior. But I’ll notice shit and be like, Okay, right. That’s gaslighting. I got that. I thought it was an interesting revelation.
What you’re saying is what stood out to me about it: this acceptance in those lines. It’s not an argument, just, like, “Yeah, see this. I understand why it’s bad.”
Yeah, “I hear you” — it’s that thing I’ve never really said in my life that really means a lot. In relationships, you’ve got to hear people. I think that it’s delivered in a way that it does come across like that — that it’s not cynical.
It is a line that definitely could be read differently if it were thrown into a song like “Part of the Band.”
Exactly. But where it sits, I think that you can feel where I am emotionally in that song, and I don’t think that you feel suspicious of me in that song. You know that I’m being pretty openhearted, even if I’m being a bit me. Maybe I’m being me for a reason: because I’m scared and tired and that’s the only way I can communicate. But then at the end of all these quippy things, I say, “The only time I feel I might get there is when we are together.” That’s the truth of the song.
To go back to the sincerity-irony thing, I feel like what I’m drawn to the most are artists that play in both, and toe that line a bit, because it makes the more earnest stuff have that much more impact.
That’s something that was echoed by another friend of mine recently when we were talking about music. If you are constantly earnest, then you’re essentially getting these ever-diminishing returns on your earnestness because it makes the earnestness less special when it happens. Also, there’s a humanity in being dynamic like that, because I don’t think that you believe anybody who isn’t ever funny or isn’t ever — what’s the word? A bit of a hypocrite. If everything’s polished and correct and earnest and direct, eventually it’s like, Where’s the smell? Where’s the human shit? And that’s what I like: the stuff that I can smell a bit. The stuff that feels human and maybe a bit more uncertain, but it’s real.
“Looking for Somebody (to Love)”
I wanna show him he’s a bitch! / I wanna fuck him up good! / I wanna smash the competition — go and kill it like a man should!!! / “You gotta show me how to push if you don’t want a shove” / Are the words of a young man, already damned, looking for somebody to love.
I think we spoke about the whole record apart from “Looking for Somebody (to Love).”
That was one that I skipped for time, actually. Unless you want to talk about it.
I think that it’s important because it’s the one song that is political. It’s a song about a school shooting, so it’s a stance in that sense, but in the way that “Love It If We Made It” got away with being what it was because it wasn’t pointing fingers — it was asking questions. It wasn’t saying, “You shouldn’t do this; we shouldn’t do this.” It was saying, “Should we be doing this? Is that okay? Do you like this image?”
“Looking for Somebody (to Love)” is about men. The place that I was coming from is that it’s very easy, and maybe fair, to demonize some incel dressed as the Joker who goes and fucking shoots up a school, right? Of course they’re a psychopath — they’re fucking whatever. But in the second verse of the song, I think what I’m saying is that if the only vocabulary that we give young men to be assertive is one of such destruction and domination and violence, then a toxic masculinity, in some forms, normally in underfunded parts of countries and forgotten parts of countries, is maybe an inevitability. I think that we need to look at the crisis of masculinity a bit more seriously and a bit more head-on. It does tend to be young white boys who spend too much time on the internet that are doing most of that terrorism in America. And I’m interested to keep that conversation going because I don’t know what the reason is, but I’ve got a sense.
This song makes me think back to two lines in the intro: “With young people as collateral” and “I’m sorry if you’re living and you’re 17.” You’re thinking about youth on this album. Where is that coming from?
Well, because of what I do, I’ve never had to grow up, right? I’m in a fucking band — what was that for a job? I’m smoking weed, and I’m still a kid. But then I think about the realities of what it would be like to be 17 now. It’s fucking insane, the things that you have to be considerate of or educated on. Also, I run a record label where our model is breaking young new artists, so I spend a lot of time with younger people. I see how much they have to deal with with their mental health and how much they have to mediate it versus whatever they’re doing, or whatever social media’s doing to them. And I really empathize. Maybe because I’m coming to an age that, let’s say, I’d have a baby. That’s not an unrealistic thing to happen to me. I’d have my concerns about the world from a different perspective.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
