The 10 best songs by The 1975
Over the last decade, The 1975 have graduated from playing sweaty clubs in provincial British towns to headlining festivals worldwide. Their stock has slowly risen with each album, and their tale has been far from an overnight success story.
Matty Healy, George Daniel, Ross McDonald, and Adam Hann began playing music together as teenagers after meeting at school in Cheshire. Before landing upon the moniker of The 1975, they played under a number of guises, including Drive Like I Do, and in 2012, a decade after they first met as students, the band released their debut EP.
Their eponymous debut album arrived a year later and topped the charts in the United Kingdom. Since then, they’ve released an additional four LPs, each with a different sound and aesthetic that differentiate the chapters of The 1975. With each record, the group have evolved and is now an unavoidable force of nature.
While many of The 1975’s peers they rose to prominence alongside have fallen to the wayside, the group is currently at the peak of their creativity and won’t disappear anytime soon.
The 10 best songs by The 1975:
10. ‘People’
In 2019, when The 1975 first shared ‘People’ as a snippet from their upcoming album, Notes On A Conditional Form, it seemed to be the beginning of a new chapter for the band, which was louder, and more abrasive than ever before. While the LP didn’t continue down the same heavy rock route, it was the perfect mechanism for the band to convey the track’s powerful message.
“We’ve forgotten the fundamental fact that we humans like other humans,” Healy told NME of the track in 2019. The singer felt compelled to write the anger-filled, ‘People’, following the passing of an abortion ban in Alabama while The 1975 were playing at a festival in the state which made him become profoundly saddened at the state of the world. Rather than staying silent, he used the band’s stage time at Hangout to lament the ban and proceeded to write ‘People’ on the tour bus.
9. ‘The City’
‘The City’ is a track from the start of The 1975’s journey in 2012 and written about their early days, which consisted of late-night frolicking in Manchester. For many, it was their first introduction to the group and was crucial in expanding their popularity. If the energy of their debut album were distilled into one song, it would be ‘The City’, which embodies the carefree spirit of youth which fuelled the eponymous record.
During an interview with WTGR (via SongFacts), Healy said of the track: “It was the first piece of music that anybody could have ever heard by The 1975, so it’s very important to us. I think that there’s a lot to be said about us in that song both sonically, musically and personally.”
8. ‘Robbers’
‘Robbers’ is another cut from The 1975’s debut and depicts a twisted tale of a relationship destined to end in disaster. The track operated as an early insight into Healy’s storytelling instincts which would later become a key component of their work in the future. However, apart from ‘Robbers’, this attribute was largely absent on their first full-length release but operated as a sign of what was to come.
“I got really obsessed with the idea behind Patricia Arquette’s character in True Romance when I was about 18,” Healy said in a statement. “That craving for the bad boy in that film, it’s so sexualised. It was something I was obsessed with. ‘Robbers’ is about a heist that goes wrong. I suppose you can read it as a metaphor, and a girl who’s obsessed with her professional killer boyfriend. It’s a romantic ideal.”
7. ‘Somebody Else’
On their awkwardly titled second album, I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It, The 1975 defied convention and showed they differed from typical four-piece indie bands. They implemented tropes from different genres across the record with the synth-heavy ‘Somebody Else’, which implemented production techniques from electronic music, and brought the group into a new sonic realm.
Lyrically, the song captures the heartbreaking moment Healy discovered his former lover had moved on to somebody new, which ripped him apart. “I’m not proud of that jealousy but I think everybody struggles with that kind of ownership. Both sides feel that way when your partner of a certain amount of time goes off and is with someone else in a sexual or emotional way,” the frontman said of the concept behind ‘Somebody Else’ to the BBC.
6. ‘Love Me’
The 1975 elected to choose ‘Love Me’ as the lead single from their second album, and it acted as an enticing opening page to an illuminating chapter in their history. The colourful track is reminiscent of pop music from the 1980s and boasts an arena-sized funk-infused chorus which laid out their intention to become the biggest band in the world.
Upon its release in 2016, ‘Love Me’ was a welcomed throwback to a thriving era of pop music when David Bowie was going through his Just Dance period. However, underneath the glitziness of ‘Love Me’, the song is a candid look at the isolating nature of fame and success, which proved difficult to swallow following the success of their debut album.
5. ‘Part Of The Band’
As this list shows, The 1975 always make a bold statement with the lead singles from their albums. While ‘Part Of The Band’ from Being Funny In A Foreign Language is more delicate than other songs in their canon that had previously fulfilled this role, there’s a beauty to be uncovered within the track’s simplicity. It also provided a taste of the minimalist approach they adopted on the LP.
Explaining why they chose to announce the album with ‘Part Of The Band’, Healy said (via SongFacts): “We don’t even think about what the biggest tune is. We think, ‘If we have to put one of these songs out, what is the song that’s the status update we can build on narratively?'” said Healy. “There’s a realism to this song that exists across the whole album. I think a lot of the album is about empathy. And empathising with one another, because I think that I got to a point where I’ve started to maybe give myself a break a bit more in my life.”
4. ‘Sex’
As much as The 1975 have developed since they released their debut album, ‘Sex’ remains one of the most defining tracks of their career. The song typifies the lustful feelings of late teenage relationships and contains an irresistible hook that has continuously caused carnage at their shows for the last decade. While their sound has moved on, there’s an explosiveness to ‘Sex’, which is still irresistible.
At the time of release, Healy spoke to Gigwise about the anthemic track and explained: “It’s not necessarily about one girl, it’s just about being seventeen and that happening all the time – the kind of indecisive prudishness of certain teenage girls. A lot of people relate to that, even girls themselves relate to it.”
3. ‘It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You)’
On the surface, ‘It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You)’ sounds like a beautiful love song, with funky guitars and enticing synths, from the perspective of a man who will do anything for his partner. However, it wasn’t a love interest that acted as Healy’s muse for the song, but his addiction to heroin which nearly cost him his livelihood.
Before the release of this song, Healy’s secret battle with heroin addiction wasn’t public knowledge, but the singer could no longer live a lie, and after getting clean, he used ‘It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You)’ as the vessel to unveil his truth. “It’s quite obvious it’s about me, because there’s been a real reluctance for me to talk about it,” he admitted to Pitchfork. “I didn’t want to talk about being a heroin addict for five years – having actual nightmares of the idea of it being uncovered. So there was a humorous reluctance to disclose it in this song.”
2. ‘About You’
The 1975 usually work in an insular fashion and tend to keep collaborators down to a minimum. However, for ‘About You’, they teamed up with Nick Cave’s right-hand man, Warren Ellis, who brought out a new dimension to the band’s sound and added a sprinkling of magic to the Being Funny In A Foreign Language track.
According to comments by Healy during an appearance on Apple Music, before Ellis got his hands on ‘About You’, the track was similar to U2’s ‘With Or Without You’ but he transformed it into a “weird and shoegazey” creation. Additionally, guitarist Adam Hann’s wife, Carly Holt, also deserves recognition for her tear-jerking backing vocals, which build upon the song’s emotional atmosphere and cement the track as the highlight of the band’s fifth album.
1. ‘Love It If We Made It’
Throughout the band’s career, The 1975 has tackled an enormity of subject matters from personal turmoil to bold political statements, with ‘Love It If We Made It’ falling into the latter category. The lyrics explored the cataclysmic world events, which seemed to be never-ending between 2016-2018, and Healy used newspaper cuttings for inspiration.
The track is deliberately antagonistic and covers everything from the heartbreaking death of Alan Kurdi to the sexual assault allegations made against US President Donald Trump. Healy illustrates a frightening world with his words and captures a Polaroid picture of a historic moment in time. With the unfortunate blessing of hindsight, those two years Healy explores on ‘Love It If We Made It’ were crucial in creating this current toxic landscape we live in today, and this song is a snapshot for future generations to inspect. It was named ‘Best Contemporary Song’ at the Ivor Novello Awards in 2019.
“I wanted it to be loud and outward but objective, and you can’t really call me out on anything in it,” Healy told NME. “But I couldn’t get that song played on the radio because there are two words in it that are too raw for radio. One of them was a direct quote from the sitting President of the United States: ‘I moved on her like a bitch.’ We’ve heard the President say that, we know this. This happened. I’m not saying that the police are inherently racist. I’m saying that this happened.”
