How The 1975 Wrote “Somebody Else”

By the time The 1975 sat down to make a second record, they'd already answered the only question that matters commercially: could the debut have been a fluke. It wasn't. Their self-titled first album had entered the UK chart at Number 1 and gone on to become the band's best-selling record at home, and they'd filled London's Royal Albert Hall by 2014 — the kind of booking that turns a buzz band into an actual going concern. Then, in June 2015, they vanished. The band deleted their social media accounts entirely, and Matty Healy began seeding cryptic posts built from lyrics no one had heard yet. When the accounts reappeared, it was with a blurred image captioned “The 1975 — 2” — a rebrand disguised as a riddle, engineered to make people talk before there was anything to hear.

The album itself, I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful yet So Unaware of It, was recorded across 2015 at Ravenscourt in London and The Ranch, a studio in Woodland Hills, California, with Healy, drummer/co-producer George Daniel, and outside producer Mike Crossey (who'd also helmed the debut) sharing duties. Seventeen tracks, seventy-three minutes, ranging from post-rock instrumentals to full stadium pop — an almost defiantly maximalist follow-up to a tight, radio-shaped first record. It arrived February 26, 2016, and went to Number 1 in both the UK and on the US Billboard 200 in its opening week — a genuine commercial coronation, not just a critical one. Buried in the middle of all that scale and glitter, at track ten, sat something much quieter.

Before it existed

“Somebody Else” wasn't part of the album's opening salvo. Lead single “Love Me,” out that October, was a “post-ironic” swipe at selfie culture built on a huge Bowie-via-“Fame” drum sound; “UGH!,” out that December, leaned further into R&B and climbed into the US Rock chart's Top 10. Whatever the record was going to be, it clearly wasn't a straight sequel to the guitar-pop of the debut — and “Somebody Else” sat well outside that early, brasher run of singles entirely.

The first idea

By Healy's own account, “Somebody Else” was the last song he wrote for the record, and its origin is unusually specific for a 1975 song: he wrote the lyrics in the back of a taxi in Los Angeles. Beyond that detail, the public record goes quiet — no interview pins down which month, which tour stop, or which relationship's immediate aftermath the cab ride followed, and this piece isn't going to guess.

What Healy has been clear about is the emotional shape of the thing. Speaking to the BBC backstage at a festival in July 2016, he described the song as being about “the after effects of a break-up and the jealousy that goes with it”: “I'm not proud of that jealousy but I think everybody struggles with that kind of ownership. Both sides feel that way when your partner of a certain amount of time goes off and is with someone else in a sexual or emotional way.” He named the specific, unglamorous feeling driving the song directly: “You have that guilty jealousy. You don't want them but you certainly don't want someone else to have them.”

He's also been unusually confident about the result in retrospect. In a 2017 interview, Healy noted that the band's most emotionally exposed material tends to land harder with audiences than the more performative stuff — and cited “Somebody Else” as the clearest proof of it: “As soon as I finished writing it, I was like ‘This is a tune.’” Discussing his most nakedly personal songs elsewhere, Healy described writing itself as a kind of self-administered distancing technique — that once a feeling becomes a finished song, he can “objectively think about it” in a way he couldn't while it was still just a feeling.

Inside the studio

Credit-wise, “Somebody Else” is a full-band composition — Healy, Daniel, guitarist Adam Hann, and bassist Ross MacDonald are all listed as writers — produced by Healy and Daniel alongside Mike Crossey. It runs 5:47, in C major at a steady 100 BPM — unusually long and unhurried for what became one of the album's most visible singles.

No source specifies which of the two studios “Somebody Else” itself was tracked at, so this piece states the general recording locations rather than asserting one specifically. What is documented is a shift in how Crossey and the band worked together the second time around. George Daniel has said Crossey embraced the band's own pre-existing production and synth arrangements this time, rather than reworking them from scratch — consistent with Daniel's separate account of building his vocal layering on the record from an “organic version of a vocoder,” recording individual harmony notes by hand rather than processing them artificially, inspired by the spatial, chorused vocal production of Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel. Neither interview names “Somebody Else” specifically when describing those techniques — the documented examples are other tracks on the record — so this piece states that as how the album as a whole was built, without claiming certainty about which individual techniques appear on this particular song.

The lyrics

“Somebody Else” is a breakup song that refuses the two easiest exits — neither pure longing nor clean anger — and sits instead in the more embarrassing space between them. Healy's opening admission sets the tone plainly: “I don't want your body, but I hate to see your body with somebody else.” It's a line built to contradict itself in real time, and the song keeps doing that: wanting the breakup and resenting its consequences simultaneously. Its quieter verses — “I took all my things that make sound, the rest I could do without” — work through jealousy mediated by distance and technology rather than a physical rival: “I'm looking through you as you're looking through your phone, and then leaving with somebody else.”

What the public record does not include is any confirmation of who the song is about. Healy has discussed the emotion at length; he has not named, or been reliably reported to have named, the person on the other end of it, and this piece won't fill that gap either.

Why it worked

“Somebody Else” landed as a tonal outlier against its own album cycle. Where “Love Me,” “UGH!” and “The Sound” had all revelled in confusion by cabaret — brash, ironic, deliberately provocative — one contemporary review called “Somebody Else” “gentle and soft-of-touch,” “a slow jam in every sense of the word,” and “at times spellbinding, at others baffling.” A panel of critics scored it 7.75 out of 10 on aggregate at the time — high but genuinely contested, with some praising its “lush poise” and the way it balances “excess and fragility,” while at least one dissenting critic scored it as low as 2 over the bridge's tonal swerve.

Part of what made the song distinctive was how literally it staged its own contradictions on screen. The music video, directed by Tim Mattia and shot at London's Alexandra Road Estate, ends with a twist: the man Healy's character has been watching his ex-lover leave with turns out to be Healy himself, in a wig and dress, and the song's jealousy curdles into a genuinely strange, self-directed love scene. Healy described the shoot as “an intense creative process” — “I had to shoot a love scene with a guy dressed as me... It was surreal. We had to shoot almost two or three videos because it goes back on itself” — and confirmed he writes every one of the band's video treatments himself, alongside the song: “I write the storyline when I'm writing the song and how I see it in my head. It gives continuity.” The song was shortlisted for Best Track at the 2017 NME Awards, ultimately losing to Christine and the Queens' “Tilted.”

Legacy

Commercially, “Somebody Else” was a slow-building success rather than an immediate smash, peaking at Number 55 on the UK Singles Chart across eleven separate weeks in 2016 as streaming numbers accumulated, while performing more strongly on America's genre-specific rock charts. It's certified Platinum in the UK and Gold in the US and Australia, though a March 2026 report on the song crossing one billion Spotify streams — the band's first track to do so, coinciding with the album's tenth anniversary — describes the certification as “2× Platinum” in both the UK and US, which doesn't square cleanly with the earlier figures. This piece presents both rather than picking one, since no source specifies whether a recertification occurred between those dates.

Its afterlife has mostly been carried by other musicians. Lorde performed it live in Paris in October 2017 and told fans it was her most-played track on Spotify at the time, calling it “a perfect classic forever song” despite admitting she wasn't otherwise deeply familiar with the band's catalogue. Charlie Puth stripped it down to keys and acoustic guitar for a BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge session in September 2016; Vérité covered it the same week, calling herself “a big fan of The 1975's vision, aesthetic and how effective their writing is”; and Chvrches took it on for their own Live Lounge session in 2018, calling their version a “half banger, ballad banger” and noting that the original, played at double speed, sounds almost exactly like a Chvrches song already.

Ten years on, retrospective writing about the album has tended to treat “Somebody Else” as its most durable moment — not its flashiest, but its most quietly correct. One tenth-anniversary reassessment singled out the phone-screen verse specifically: “there's just something about it that makes my spine tingle,” while still noting the bridge's blunter turn as the song's weakest artistic choice. That's roughly the same split verdict the song got on release — spellbinding in its verses, more contested in its swagger — which suggests “Somebody Else” hasn't so much won over its skeptics with time as simply outlasted the argument about it. A modest chart peak, a jealousy Healy himself called unflattering, and a chorus of other artists who kept singing it back: that combination, more than any single review, is the real measure of the song's afterlife.

Page history: Published Aug 7 2026 · Third entry in The Making Of series · No corrections to date