“When it came out, going by the comments on our social media, people were like, ‘What is this?’” How The 1975’s Adam Hann took a “jokey heavy riff” and turned it into the band’s first proper rock song

Adam Hann plays his Ernie Ball Music Man John Petrucci signature model with the Jackson Pollock-inspired finish onstage with the 1975, as the band play Grant Park, Chicago, on the 2023 Lollapalooza tour.

Sometimes you’ve got to shock your audience to move your sound forward, and that’s exactly what The 1975 did with People, as guitarist Adam Hann engineered the most hostile electric guitar tone that he had ever committed to tape, and applied all that skronk to three minutes of garage glam-rock anarchy.

As the first single plucked from their fourth studio album, Notes on a Conditional Form, People was a statement of intent. It was something different.