Notes on a Conditional Form is the fourth studio album by English band the 1975, released on 22 May 2020 through Dirty Hit and Polydor Records. The album follows their third album A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships (2018) and is the second of two albums from their third release cycle, "Music for Cars". The album marks a significant change in sound from the band's previous albums, with genres spanning from industrial rock[2] to more electronic sounds, such as house.
In an alternate universe, singer/guitarist Matthew Healy would be onstage at Madison Square Garden with his chart-topping, Grammy-nominated band The 1975 delivering for 20,000 fans the foursome’s canon of songs that run the gamut from shimmering electro-pop to snarly, punky rock.
Instead, Healy’s excited, rapid-fire, articulate musings on music and culture — specifically The 1975’s new, fourth album, “Notes on a Conditional Form” and its previous, sort of counterpart, 2018’s “A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships” — is interrupted by an unholy shriek. It seems a bird has flown into the recording studio in Oxford, England, narrowly missing the singer’s head. “It really freaked me out! My heart’s going!” he says, breathless, before quickly charging back into the task at hand.
It’s an apt interruption for a singer who can turn on a dime from a whisper to a scream. The 1975 is unarguably more popular in their home country of England where they’ve won at the Brit Awards and Ivor Novello Awards and earned a Mercury Prize nomination. But Spotify streams of 345 million for 2016’s “Somebody Else” track, and the strength of the lilting, summery “Me & You Together” from the new release, have brought arena-sized success Stateside.
With “Notes on a Conditional Form,” the band members — Healy, drummer George Daniel, guitarist Adam Hann and bassist Ross MacDonald — have created a mysterious, 80-minute masterwork, which they’re obviously currently unable to support on the planned American arena tour. But any disappointment was quickly tempered by gratitude. “We got quite appreciative of the fact that we make music and can continue to do that,” says Healy. “We knew there was a [studio] environment where we could go and feel safe, so we were counting our chickens in that regard, as opposed to the number of people who completely have had even their ability to ‘be’ dismantled. We’re in a privileged situation, you know?”
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