Earlier this year, the 1975, Britain’s most divisive arena-dwelling band, caused a minor ripple of controversy while announcing their fifth album. The problem wasn’t the very-online frontman Matty Healy’s shenanigans on Twitter – after quitting the app in 2020, he has since returned without a blue tick, but with a bio that reads “deleted once I’m verified” – or the fact they had ditched the self-produced route of their previous work in favour of pop’s go-to producer, Jack Antonoff. The problem was the length of the record itself. News articles were cobbled together showing tweets from fans bemoaning the fact that Being Funny in a Foreign Language’s svelte 11-track, 43-minute run time is about half that of 2020’s sprawling Notes on a Conditional Form. “It’s so short nooooo” ran one tweet.
