i like it when you sleep the 1975 album cover

The band’s musicianship seems finally to be catching up with their aspirations to be a dominant force in radio pop. Something in the track’s flamboyance shows a willingness to crash and burn, and it’s precisely those stakes that were missing on The 1975.įollow-up “UGH!” is the spiritual successor to “Chocolate” in the sense that it’s also about getting high, but its fun, funkified chorus really has no precedent in The 1975’s catalog. This is a song that wants desperately to be liked, and, strangely enough, it is sort of likable. The lead guitar riff rips off David Bowie’s “Fame” and the chorus mirrors The Isley Brothers’ “It’s Your Thing”, but both instances of plagiarism feel self-conscious and self-effacing. The album’s first proper track, “Love Me”, is both a celebration and an admonishment of narcissism, a superficial slice of dance pop that succumbs to everything it professes to scorn. The band’s sonic palette has stretched out considerably in both directions, and the only overarching rule seems to be “excess.” Whereas before they seemed fairly one-dimensional, this version of The 1975 contains multitudes - unruly multitudes, sure, but ones that clash and contradict in interesting ways. The good news is that Healy did not follow his own advice this time around. A good second album should expand upon its predecessor, flying off in new directions rather than trying to recreate the same accidental chemical reactions, many of which will forever belong to a different time and place. In an interview with Australia’s Hit 30 last summer, Healy mused that a successful second album should be “a distillation of the first.” He couldn’t have been more wrong. But despite its handful of great songs (one predictably called “Sex”, another a catchy paean to cannabis use), The 1975 ultimately came across as kind of hollow: A British Synthpop for Dummies guide that stops abruptly after the introduction. The fact that lots of people listened - The 1975 hit number one on the UK albums charts in its first week - is a testament to the band’s irresistible synthpop hooks and frontman Matthew Healy’s hypersexual, hedonistic lyrical purview. This is a welcome change of pace and perspective from The 1975’s self-titled debut, which at times felt less like an album and more like a press release screaming “Next Big Thing” at anybody who would listen. There’s a clue buried somewhere in the clumsy, 16-word title of The 1975’s sophomore album, I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It, that’s key to their new sound. It’s a clue that, despite the neon-soaked, art gallery minimalism of the album’s cover, signals the band is no longer preoccupied with being perceived as cool.

I like it when you sleep the 1975 album cover