Anatomy of an Album: I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful yet So Unaware of It

By early 2015, The 1975 had a problem most bands would take: a UK No. 1 debut and a rabid, fast-growing fanbase, and no obvious idea of what to do with either. Matty Healy's own account of what came next, given to Billboard around the album's release, is unusually blunt about the method: “It's the product of an all-consuming creative bender.” He's described the mindset behind it just as plainly to NME: “We had to not care to make the album that we did in the end. We made a really, really honest record; a record we wanted to make, and for us, it was really uncompromising.”

Even the title has a deliberately unpoetic origin. Healy told Rolling Stone it came from “something I said to a girlfriend of mine at the time. Like all situations, I'm sure it wasn't quite as poetic as it sounds.” He connected the phrase to a bigger anxiety about the band's new visibility: “We had gone from an unknown band to known about so we were being objectified and known about. We were kind of fearful of certain things, and we made the decision that the only thing that was going to remedy that was to make a record that was just about the truth and not about what we thought we should be saying.”

That meant leaving behind the subject matter that built the debut. As Healy explained to NME's Dan Stubbs in the band's 2016 Album of the Year cover interview: “My life had changed and I couldn't make another record about being a bored, middle-class teenager in Macclesfield, but I also didn't want to get caught in the trap of making a record about ‘poor famous me.’ So I went quite inward — it's not about going partying, it's an odyssey into my brain.” The album's sprawl — 17 tracks, roughly 74 minutes — was a conscious choice pushed to its physical limit: “We wanted it to feel very cinematic and it is almost the length of a film. We got to the point where we were told it wouldn't fit on a CD if we carried on. It was just this really exciting creative bender, and the more ridiculous it got, the more subversive it got.”

Laptops on the road, then four months in Woodland Hills

The record came together across most of 2015, at Ravenscourt Studios in London and, for a long stretch, at The Ranch, producer Mike Crossey's studio in Woodland Hills, on the edge of Los Angeles. Guitarist Adam Hann gave the clearest account of that stretch to Premier Guitar: “We had the luxury of being able to spend four months in the studio in L.A. recording it. I feel like that's an amount of time not many people get in the studio nowadays.” But the songs themselves mostly didn't start in that room. George Daniel, the band's drummer and de facto co-producer, described the actual writing chain to iZotope: “The songs are 90% of the time a bi-product of a programmed arrangement that I will start on my laptop, usually a rhythm and chord progression, bass line, or synth arrangement. I'll then take my ideas to Matthew Healy, and he will decide whether he feels like there is enough of a strong foundation for him to write melody over.” Most of that groundwork, he added, happened nowhere near a studio at all: “Most of the production is done on the road; buses, hotel rooms, dressing rooms, etc. We can pretty much write purely with a laptop on the road.”

Crossey's role, as on the debut, was to refine what the band had already built rather than impose a separate vision. Daniel again, to the same interviewer: “Mike was the first producer we met that had ever really wanted to embrace the production we had done previously… It was nice when we ended up using lots of my stems for the final synth arrangements and programming.” He was specific about the science of it too: “Mike's input would always be far more scientific than ours. He'd easily spot the frequencies that were contributing too much or too little to an arrangement and really allow us to sonically fulfill our potential.” Hann's own framing of the sessions to Premier Guitar captures the same hierarchy from the guitar side: “Predominantly George will sit on a laptop and create things that way, then he'll say, ‘We need to put some guitars on this.’ It's a bit unconventional, but that's what works for us.” Hann also named the target sound directly: “This album has a specific sound that we had in our heads, which is this ‘80s active Strat sound — like you hear on a Madonna record.”

The band's signature vocal stacks — that gospel-choir wall behind Healy's voice — are a specific, deliberate technique, not a plugin. Daniel explained it to Coup de Main: “We've always recorded each note individually, so that you get this full kind of choral harmony which isn't totally artificial,” tracing the sound to “the 80s… this massive craze of double-tracking and chorus harmonisers” and specifically the Eventide Harmonizer sound associated with Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel records. He also credited a genuine deep-dive into his own record collection for the era's synth textures, telling Roland: “I got massively into Fleetwood Mac's Tango in the Night… We used a lot of FM synthesis on our second album.”

The songs, in their words

Healy has talked through this record's individual tracks with unusual specificity — more than almost any other 1975 album.

“Love Me” started life two years before release. Hann: “‘Love Me,’ for example, was written two years ago on tour jamming this idea out in soundcheck — that's how we got that song.” Healy has described it as satire aimed inward: “It was a time where pop music wasn't overly encumbered with self-awareness or trying to be too cool. That's why you got amazing bands like INXS or what Bowie was doing at that time,” he told BBC Radio 1's Annie Mac, framing the song as “about a lack of self-awareness” and, more bluntly to NME, “just taking the piss out of myself.” Hann has singled out the guitar solo as a genuine studio highlight: Crossey called it “probably one of the best guitar solos… in terms of the creativity behind the whole identity of it, that he's ever recorded.”

“UGH!” is, in Healy's own telling, about coming down off cocaine — and he didn't dress that up for The Guardian: “That song is me being flippant about cocaine: ‘Stop pacing round the room using other people's faces as a mirror for you.’” He confirmed the same to Rolling Stone, adding of his social circle at the time, “The social group around me involves cocaine. It does.” The song's distinctive swirling texture, per Hann, comes from a specific piece of gear borrowed from Crossey: “We did loads and loads and loads of takes with the phase on and then went through and captured all the moments where the sweep of the phase hit what we were playing perfectly.”

“The Sound” was actually written during the debut's sessions and held back. Healy explained the delay to Billboard: “I think we just made an album that provided context to that song… it's so poppy in its sensibilities, but like everything we do in The 1975 it's juxtaposed to a narrative that's a little more dark or introspective.” In a genuinely surprising aside, he told Q magazine he'd first offered the song elsewhere: “I ended up showing them ‘The Sound’ as a suggestion, but nothing came of it” — "them" being One Direction. The music video, which flashes real critical put-downs of the band across pink screens, was Healy's own idea about “the culture that surrounds our band and that divisive conversation.”

“Somebody Else” was the last song finished for the record — and, by Healy's account years later on CBC's Q with Tom Power, one of the fastest: “Somebody Else — from start to finish, as a song — happened in 90 minutes in an evening in L.A., when everyone was, like, high in 2015.” He's described the emotion at its center to the BBC as “guilty jealousy” — not wanting someone back, but not wanting anyone else to have them either.

“A Change of Heart” deliberately recycles lines from the debut (“Robbers,” “The City,” “Sex”) as a knowing callback. Healy told Rolling Stone: “There's a knowing to this album in place of the naïveté of the first one.” He's called it “such a simple song — three notes — and the truth,” adding that it “turned into a very atypical ‘1975’ song, being very sentimental, very self-aware, and as beautiful as we can make it.” Its clown-themed video (a nod to Fellini's I Clowns) prompted a real-life fallout he later admitted to NME: “I got a phone call off my ex just going f--king nuts. I had to be like, ‘It's not really even about you, sorry.’” George Daniel, for his part, ribbed Healy's vocal on the same track in the NME cover feature: “You're crooning on this album, like you're f**king Elvis or something.”

“She's American” is, per Healy in Billboard, meant affectionately rather than as a takedown: “That song is playful. Not a snarling takedown but it's about being in an English rock band and the nuances of the courting process between American girls and British boys.” He clarified the joke's actual target to Stereogum: “British people don't have bad teeth, but [‘She's American’] is more about being British than it is about girls being American.”

“Paris” turns an unrealized trip into a stand-in for a whole relationship. Healy, to Rock Ur Life: “This trip to Paris that never happened stood for the salvation of our relationship. The lyrics ‘how I'd love to go to Paris again’ is how I'd love to go back to that place where we were.” He's named a line from it as the one he's proudest of on the whole record: “Hey kids, we're all just the same, what a shame” — telling Dork it was the exact moment “I felt like I knew what the album was. That inspired ‘Loving Someone.’”

“Nana,” a stripped acoustic elegy for Healy's late grandmother Annie, drew on a specific, wordless understanding between him and Daniel. Healy: “The vocabulary that George and I share is unspoken, it's like shorthand. There is a bit in ‘Nana’ where it all stops, and I remember George saying, ‘Let's just put a memory in there; let's just have it open up and your vocal can become distant’… and I was like: ‘F---ing hell.’” Daniel traced the idea to 10cc's “I'm Not in Love” and described his own approach to songs this personal as deliberately restrained, so “Matty can fulfil exactly what he's trying to do.” Hann, meanwhile, remembered the unglamorous reality of finishing it: “The work that went into recording the guitar part took like two days in the studio for one seemingly incidental guitar part on the album.” Healy has been direct about the song's bluntness with death: “There's a line in it that goes ‘I don't like it now that you're dead’… death is the ultimate context of metaphor.”

The album's closer, “She Lays Down,” is about his mother, actress Denise Welch, and her post-natal depression — the most personal song on a record built around personal disclosure. Healy told NME in December 2016: “It doesn't get much more personal than that… she was so gripped by post-natal depression that she was coming into my room when I was a couple of months old, lying on the floor and actively trying to love me.”

Even the record's ambient interludes have a traceable lineage. The six-and-a-half-minute title track is one of the oldest demos on the album, built around what Daniel called a rule-breaking tempo shift: “After the vocal, ‘Before you go / Leave the light on,’… it winds down and changes tempo by a lot — I think it's about 12 BPM, and that just shouldn't work… But yeah, it was just from my love for Four Tet and Jon Hopkins… Boards Of Canada, and beat-orientated ambient music.”

What it did

The album gave the band their first-ever Billboard 200 No. 1 in the US and their second UK No. 1, and did both at once — a rare feat Billboard noted put them alongside David Bowie, Adele, Muse and Florence + the Machine as recent British acts to top both charts simultaneously. In the UK, the Official Charts Company recorded combined chart sales of 58,000 in its first week, edging out Adele's 25 by roughly 6,500 units to knock it off the top spot. It went on to be named NME's Album of the Year for 2016 and picked up a Mercury Prize nomination.

What's notable, reading the band's own account of making it back to back with the debut, is how much this record is a story of scale rather than reinvention. The same writing chain (Daniel's laptop, Healy's melody, Crossey's refinement), the same emotional register (real, named, sometimes uncomfortable subject matter sitting next to unapologetic pop hooks) — just applied at a length and a level of confidence the band didn't yet have in 2013. They didn't set out to prove they could do something different. They set out to prove the first idea could survive getting much, much bigger.

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