I Fixed Your Album: Literally any tracklist for The 1975's "Notes On a Conditional Form" would be better than the one they went with
It's probably the most batshit sequencing job I've encountered on a major album
Being a fan of the 1975 has always been a complicated proposition.
Musically, the Manchester quartet answers questions nobody asked. What if M83 was an emo band? What if Hall and Oates only wrote songs about the internet? What if One Direction thought they were good enough to become Radiohead, and then actually tried to do it? If that all sounds both preposterous and fascinating, it totally is.
In the past 10-ish years, the 1975 has assembled one of the most adventurous catalogs in rock — and cultivated a mainstream following during a period in which guitar-driven music largely receded from the center of pop culture — primarily by ignoring genre boundaries that barely applied to them anyway.
The 1975 looks, behaves and probably smells like a rock band despite only occasionally sounding like one. The group’s five albums dabble in electro-pop, mall-punk, arena rock, shoegaze, ‘90s Britpop, hip-hop, dubstep, EDM, country, New Wave and probably a half-dozen other styles I’m forgetting. The band’s creative palette also incorporates an apparently bottomless supply of pop hooks, singer Matty Healy’s internet-brain wordplay and a degree of conceptual ambition and self-mythology that almost nobody bothers attempting anymore. The reach-versus-grasp ratio is often widely askew, but The 1975 arguably produced at least a half-dozen of the previous decade's best songs in any format*.
The price of admission, however, is Healy himself, who is kind of a lot. The band's reliably attention-generating leader is partly a Rock Star in the great British tradition of debauched, endearingly mouthy frontmen — your Jaggers, Gallaghers, Dohertys and so on — and partly an avatar for the aspects of that persona that are annoying: the being controversial for its own sake, the performative dirtbag masculinity, the elusiveness of an actual worldview amid a steady stream of provocations.
His complexity (or “complexity”) as a public figure is illustrated by pretty much any combination of headlines assembled from the first page of Google News results:
Healy went extremely viral last year for eating raw steak while pantomiming masturbation onstage during a show at Madison Square Garden.
He caused an uproar for comments during a podcast interview that were interpreted as racist and misogynistic (and for which he sort of apologized).
He scandalized the Malaysian government after causing the cancellation of a festival his band was playing in Kuala Lumpur by (righteously, it seems) protesting the country's anti-LGBTQ+ policies.
He may have popularized the concept of “post-woke” pop stardom.
He was referred to by Noel Gallagher as a “slack-jawed fuckwit” in the year’s most hilarious music feud.
He caused a civil war within a famously intense fanbase during his widely chronicled fling with Taylor Swift shortly after her Eras Tour began moving like a weather system through the American economy. You’re having quite a year when hooking up with the world’s biggest artist is the seventh bullet point.
And that’s just from the past 12 months or so. Whether the music is worth this sometimes comically high barrier of entry will of course depend on the listener. I’m faintly embarrassed to admit how much I’ve always enjoyed The 1975 and still do. They have demonstrated better than anybody how smoothly the outdated model of a band in a vocals/guitar/bass/drums configuration can adapt to rapidly changing trends while also making those trends legible to many of us who are no longer young enough to pay attention. They’re also proud torchbearers for the Madchester rave/rock scene developed in their hometown in the late 1980s despite having barely been alive when it was happening. Something about their M.O. almost evokes K-pop in how it ingests a half-century of Anglophone culture, runs it through a blender and spits out something that sounds familiar and utterly new at the same time. But, crucially, The 1975’s output prioritizes restraint and songcraft over sensory payoff, which is why I suspect I’m nowhere near the only elder millennial with a sheepish affection for this band.
Within this cohort, however, I have what I suspect is a minority opinion, which is that The 1975’s 2020 album “Notes On a Conditional Form” is my go-to. Even if it’s not many fans’ favorite, “NOACF” demonstrates the band’s vast stylistic reach (if not always its grasp) better than anything else in its catalog. It is a companion, of sorts, to its predecessor, 2018’s “A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships,” a work of generational ambition that produced a handful of towering moments, “Love It If We Made It” chief among them. But “Brief Inquiry” contrasted its lofty ceiling with a pretty low floor. The anthems are as righteous as advertised, but there’s a shitload of filler.
Inconsistency is just one quality shared by the two albums, whose relationship is, to my ear, analogous to that of U2’s “Achtung Baby” and “Zooropa.” The former is the zeitgeist-grabbing Statement, while the latter plays as a companion work that expands on ideas teased by its predecessor while being less concise, less focused, and in many ways more interesting.
“NOACF” is wildly eclectic, which is both its selling point and its biggest setback. The album sprawls across 22 tracks and 80 minutes, still the maximum possible runtime for a CD, last I knew, if that matters to anyone. It overflows with collage-like ambience, abstract electronic excursions, experimental flights of pop fantasy, and fewer massive songs, but on the whole, probably more good ones. There is a lot of excellent material on the album, but (and this is a common observation) “NOACF” might feature the most batshit track-sequencing job I’ve ever encountered on a major album. Which is why we’re here.
It seriously makes zero sense how they’ve ordered these tracks…
Per the band’s tradition, the album leads off with a track called “The 1975,” and this one’s a real party. It’s five minutes of atmospheric muzak beneath a lecture by Greta Thunberg about, what else, how badly we’ve fucked the climate. Vital message and all, but Jesus. Next is the rager “People,” a lacerating punk-adjacent fist-pumper. After that, let’s see... a momentum-killing instrumental, “The End (Music For Cars),” that contains no melody or movement; an engaging but slow-moving bit of electronic introspection (“Frail State of Mind”); another ambient instrumental, “Streaming,” that sounds identical to the previous instrumental and adds virtually nothing; the cheeky but also slow-moving single “The Birthday Party”... you get the idea. There are something like 8 songs that are mostly wordless. Some tracks sound like fragments stretched far longer than their central ideas seem to justify; meanwhile one of the most interesting rock tracks, the My Bloody Valentine homage “Then Because She Goes,” is over in barely two minutes. There is so little logic to the track order that they might as well have thrown everything onto a playlist, hit shuffle and posted the first result to their streaming accounts, which for all I know is exactly what I did.
And yet. I’ve listened to “NOACF” more than any other 1975 album, just because of how MUCH is going on. It evokes the “White Album” argument (if not the “White Album” itself) in favor of sprawling double releases: that its much-ness is part of why it’s so affecting, even though a lot of the material is easily recognizable as inessential. As if to retroactively justify this album’s bloat, The 1975 returned in 2022 with “Being Funny In a Foreign Language,” an 11-track, 43-minute album that answered the question “NOACF” begged, which is what would a tight, economical, fat-free 1975 album sound like? And...yeah, really good. Straight down the middle, sincere, surefooted. It’s a set of all base hits, rather than a messy collection of big swings that sometimes whiff completely but often connect for doubles and triples.
I feel as if the more I think about the albums I’m rebuilding, the more likely I am to talk myself out of condensing double albums. Because I wouldn’t bother if I didn’t like the existing album. But the suggestion that most double albums would work better as single albums is not abstract. Just because I like “BFIAFL” less than “NOACF,” it doesn’t mean “NOACF” wouldn’t still be better as a much shorter album. It remains an ideal meal for the album gods. So let’s go for it. Below is my condensed version of The 1975’s “Notes on a Conditional Form”:
1. If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)
2. People
3. Me & You Together Song
4. Roadkill
5. Frail State of Mind
6. Nothing Revealed/Everything Denied
7. Tonight (I Wish I Was Your Boy)
8. Then Because She Goes
9. I Think There’s Something You Should Know
10. The Birthday Party
11. What Should I Say
12. Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America
13. Guys
Total runtime: 49:53
1. If You’re Too Shy > 2. People
When you’ve got a single this catchy, this representative of the band’s skillset, why bury it? We move “Too Shy” from its original position — track 16, for fuck’s sake — to the leadoff spot. The band has opened a bunch of shows on its current tour with this song, so they clearly understand the potency of that simmering, shimmering intro, the kick of that opening lyric — “I see you online / All the time” — and the momentum of that chorus. And yes, this means no more starting every album with a different song called “The 1975,” because that’s annoying. Tough shit, Greta.
“People” retains its spot as track 2, a scabrous state-of-the-world rager that sounds a LITTLE bit like 30-somethings doing the Steve Buscemi “fellow kids” thing, but still rips pretty hard.
3. Me & You Together Song > 4. Roadkill > 5. Frail State of Mind
This run of tracks covers several stylistic bases while easing us into the meat of the album. “Me & You” is a chipper, Smiths-like slice of guitar pop, “Roadkill” is an unexpectedly affecting country-emo(?) ballad, and “Frail State” is downtempo electropop that seems less concerned with melody than atmosphere, but still sneaks its way into a listener’s head. It’s also a representative slice of young-adult anxiety with a probably tossed-out line I think about more than I should: “I’m sorry but I always get this way sometimes.”
6. Nothing Revealed/Everything Denied > 7. Tonight (I Wish I Was Your Boy)
The pairing of these tracks — two mid-tempo electropop pieces with choruses that sound vaguely complementary — is one of the few sequencing decisions on the existing album that made sense, so we’ll keep it intact on our version.
9. I Think There’s Something You Should Know > 10. The Birthday Party > 11. What Should I Say
I almost left off “Something You Should Know,” but it feels like a good leg-stretcher, and since we’re not editing for vinyl here, why the hell not? Similarly, “The Birthday Party” is near the front of the original album, but I think works better as a cool-down track. “What Should I Say” is the most interesting of “NOACF’s” electronic-forward pieces; the vibe is decidedly downtempo, but the drop hits hard and the processed vocals deliver some genuine hooks that are easy to lose track of underneath the kaleidoscopic beat. Sets us up well for our dismount.
12. Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America > 13. Guys
We’ll wrap up with a couple of ballads, one wry, one sincere. As an occasional MH370 tinfoil-hat guy, I get chills from one line in the “Jesus Christ” chorus: “Searching for planes in the sea / That’s irony.” And butterflies from this one: “If we turn into a tree, can I be the leaves?” “Guys” closes the existing album and it works just fine here, particularly since its tenderness hints at the kind of sincerity that would eventually characterize “Being Funny in a Foreign Language.”
So how’s that for a 1975 album? Bangers up front, experimentation sprinkled around and some EMOTIONS right at the end? Good stuff. The cuts were not difficult or, from the looks of it, contrarian, since the final tracklist (if not the sequence) consists of almost everything that has the most plays on Spotify. The only exception is “Playing On My Mind.” Lovely song, but the back half was getting a little ballad-heavy, and since it begins with the line “Will I live and die in a band?”, it seemed thematically redundant, since “Guys” is another open-hearted bro-down and the superior of the two songs.
I was about to call it a day, but when doing my extensive Wikipedia research for this installment of I Fixed Your Album, I learned “Notes On a Conditional Form” and “A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships” were more closely entwined than I realized. Healy told interviewers in 2017 that the band was planning a trilogy of records around the idea of “Music For Cars,” which is a concept with a whole backstory in the band’s mythology. It was the title of an early EP apparently being repurposed as a theme for the “era” that would commence with The 1975’s third album.
The 1975 wrote most of the music for both albums during same period. Much of “NOACF” was recorded during breaks in touring for “Brief Inquiry,” but I think the two records more than meet the standard for “could have been a single album.” So we can re-run this exercise and build something truly kickass.
Since I’d already spent so much time poring through “NOACF,” pulling together the best of both albums wasn’t very difficult, especially since the keepers on “Brief Inquiry” are so obvious. So here, as a bonus, is the album “Music For Cars,” assuming that a single release would have encompassed the best music of this period. Presented without further litigation:
Tracklist:
1. If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)
2. Give Yourself a Try
3. TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME
4. Frail State of Mind
5. The Birthday Party
6. Me & You Together Song
7. People
8. Love It If We Made It
9. Nothing Revealed/Everything Denied
10. Tonight (I Wish I Was Your Boy)
11. It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You)
12. Inside Your Mind
13. What Should I Say
14. I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)
15. Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America
Run time: 59:12
The sequencing here was fun, because there are some nice symmetries between the two records. “Love It If We Made It” starts with a now somewhat infamous line: “Fucking in a car / Shooting heroin” etc. So we’ll follow it with “Nothing Revealed/Everything Denied,” the “NOACF” track that directly refutes it (“I never fucked in a car / I was lying”). The “always/sometimes” tic appears near the front of the album (“Frail State”) and will come roaring back at the end in “I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes).” Fantastic stuff.
That’ll do it. I’d love it if you made it a point not to share your thoughts in the comments section.
*“Chocolate,” “The Sound,” “Somebody Else,” “Love It If We Made It,” “It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You),” “If You're Too Shy (Let Me Know)”