The 1975 were the dominant British band of the 2010s, excruciatingly self-aware singer Matty Healy the man that best articulated the exhausting everything-now maximalism of Millennial life. In a new decade, after a faltering fourth album that was so sprawling and unfocused that getting through all of its 22 songs felt way too much like work, it’s possible Healy has finally worked out how to quieten down.
Finished with the self-absorbed tedium of heroin addiction and no longer on Twitter after one too many semi-cancellations, he’s been learning jujitsu at home and buying literary ephemera. Being Funny in a Foreign Language, a skill which he says is his idea of ultimate sophistication, is half the size of its messy 2020 predecessor, with each song earning its place. Working for the first time with one of the world’s most in-demand producers, Jack Antonoff of Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey fame, must also have helped to keep things tight. Together they avoided computers more than usual and recorded their instruments with less post-production polish.
