(Polydor)Brimming with surprise guests and influences, the band’s fourth album is an ambitious, scattershot set in search of a theme
The 1975’s Notes on a Conditional Form is an album that thanks you not to classify it. Long delayed, running at roughly 80 minutes and featuring cameos – including vintage dancehall MC Cutty Ranks, urging listeners to “mash up de place”, and Greta Thunberg inciting civil disobedience – it has been touted as the concluding episode of a sequence of albums, known collectively as “music for cars”.
As
Singer Matty Healy tells it, this fourth album by the 1975 was initially conceived as a nostalgic hymn to the
British night-time of his youth, “the beauty of the M25” and “going to McDonald’s and listening to garage records in a haze in a Peugeot 206”. Later, he characterised Notes… as “emo”. Whether that meant the makeup and howling of the album’s most rabble-rousing track, People, or the more nuanced content further in, is a moot point. This set has room for both, and more besides, never quite settling on a unifying theme.