Anatomy of an Album: Being Funny in a Foreign Language

Guitarist Adam Hann didn't dress up what the previous two records had cost the band. Reflecting to Guitar World shortly after this one came out, he described making A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships and Notes on a Conditional Form back to back, with almost no gap: “When you're on tour, you're finishing at 1.00am or whatever, and then it was like, ‘Time to get working on this album!’ It just proved very challenging. There's a reason people make albums in the traditional way, and that's because it works.” After the pandemic forced Notes out into a locked-down world anyway, the band took real time off — and when they came back, everything about the process changed.

Why they finally brought in outside help

For the first time since 2016's I Like It When You Sleep, The 1975 handed part of the producer's chair to someone outside the band: Jack Antonoff, the Grammy-winning producer behind records for Taylor Swift, St. Vincent and Haim. Hann was direct about why: “I think we'd had this really difficult experience with the fourth album, and I think we just wanted someone who's made a lot of albums and knew what they were doing. Someone who had a different process in the studio… That was one of the main reasons for getting Jack, alongside just needing a safe pair of hands, really. Someone to help carry the load.”

Matty Healy's account of how the partnership actually formed, given to Minnesota's The Current, is less about hiring a producer than acquiring a friend who happened to be one: “We basically started talking about other people's records, then we became very good friends. And then we started talking about music, we started talking about our record. And I just got to the point where I knew what kind of record I wanted to make. I just didn't know exactly the best way to do it. And me and George were also tired by that point… So we just said, ‘Let's take these conversations that we're doing right now, instead of wasting time just, like, talking, let's just do this in the studio, and then we can just react to it.’” He was careful to frame it as an addition, not a handover: “A 1975 record wouldn't be a 1975 record if it wasn't done by me and George as the writers and the directors.”

Playing live in Peter Gabriel's studio

Most of the album came together at Real World Studios in Box, Wiltshire — Peter Gabriel's studio, and, per Healy, a room he'd dreamed about working in since childhood. “Real World is, if you're into music production, you know what Real World is — you know, it's the best looking and kind of sounding room that exists,” he told The Current. “So we kind of moved in there for, like, two months or something, and the record was done. Because we just went into a room, and we were like, ‘Listen, we've got instruments, we've been in the band for 20 years, anyone can make anything on a computer, let's go into a room and make a record with these instruments.’” Sessions in New York happened at Electric Lady, Antonoff's home studio, whenever the band was in the city.

Hann's account of the actual sessions describes a genuinely different process than anything the band had done before — playing together, live, in one take, rather than building songs part by part. “At Real World… there's an amazing control room that's big enough to have everything set up all at once,” he said. “In an average studio session you'd record the drums, then take everything down and record guitars, but we wanted to leave everything up. We wanted to just play together and record it and have that be the genesis of the track… It brought a real humanity to the record.” Antonoff's guiding principle, per Hann, was speed and instinct over refinement: “Jack was all about ‘the moment’ — that your first instinct is your best instinct. So whatever we do naturally, that was what we used… You'd do a couple takes and then you'd move on… We stayed away from heavily editing and heavily comping to give it a more human feel.”

The songs, in their words

“Part of the Band,” the lead single, started as something the band nearly threw away. Healy told The Current: “I really didn't know, I had written it as a kind of E Street Band, just rock song. And it was something that was totally forgotten about until we got to the studio.” What survived the rewrite was the delivery, not the arrangement: “We were playing around with different instruments, string instruments, modulators and stuff like that. And we thought, ‘You know what, let's take the rhythm out, let's take the drums out.’ And then we just made this thing out of strings and me kind of like stream-of-consciousness talking.” He placed it explicitly in a lineage of previous 1975 lead singles built to unsettle expectations on purpose, alongside “People” and “Give Yourself a Try.”

“Happiness” carries the album's most-discussed guitar part, and its final acoustic form was a late reversal. Hann: “That solo is funny because it originally started on an electric guitar, and it was this kind of fuzz, bitcrushed thing like you'd hear on a Daft Punk record. When it came to recording it, it just felt too obvious, so we thought, ‘What have we never done before?’ We'd never done anything like that on an acoustic guitar, so we just decided to do that.”

“All I Need to Hear” leans on an unusual signal chain rather than a traditional amp — Hann has described a driven guitar part “straight DI'd into a preamp; there's no amp involved,” run through a Chandler Limited Abbey Road TG unit “driven to max” for its distinctive tone.

“I'm in Love with You” is credited to Healy, Daniel and Hann jointly — the only song on the record with a guitarist's co-write — and its final mix hides an almost absurd amount of density: Hann has said the track has nine separate guitar parts running simultaneously toward its end, requiring the band to pick just three to actually play live.

“About You” deliberately continues the story the band began telling nearly a decade earlier on the debut's “Robbers” — the same characters, now viewed through nostalgia rather than heat-of-the-moment romance. Healy has confirmed the connection directly, describing the production choice behind it as going “full Phil Spector,” building a wall of reverb with string arrangements from Warren Ellis supplying its gothic atmosphere despite the song's major key.

The title, and what "intimate" actually meant

Healy has offered the same core explanation for the title in multiple interviews: comedy and empathy as the same skill, wielded across a language or cultural barrier. To The Current: “When I've seen people do that, it's so sophisticated, and people being funny, it's the height of intelligence and empathy… if we had the practical goal of getting so good in a language, that you could be funny in another language… you could empathize with the culture to such an extent that you could reveal a truth, which is what comedy does.” He's described the record's brevity as a direct reaction against the instinct that drove every previous album's length: “I think that the reason that my previous records are always so long is because I always think that I need to present, like, the whole of who I am… I think I've tried to do that in the most concise way possible.” He's also described the underlying goal in blunter terms elsewhere: not a magnum opus this time, but something closer to a Polaroid.

What it did

The album gave The 1975 their fifth consecutive UK No. 1 — putting them level with Ed Sheeran for most consecutive chart-topping albums by an act, behind only Noel Gallagher's run across Oasis and his solo career. It debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard 200 in the US, was nominated for Album of the Year at the 2023 Brit Awards, and has since passed a billion streams on Spotify. Critical reception was the most consistently positive of the band's career, with several outlets calling it among their strongest work to date.

Reading the band's own account of how it came together, the reception makes sense as a direct consequence of the method, not a coincidence. This is the first 1975 record built around subtraction rather than addition — fewer instruments layered per song, fewer producers' worth of ideas competing for space, fewer minutes on the clock. After four albums spent proving how much the band could hold at once, this one is the sound of four people who'd been in a room together since high school finally just playing in a room together again.

Page history: Published Jul 31 2026 · Fifth and final Anatomy of an Album entry for The 1975's original studio catalog · No corrections to date