The 1975: ‘Being Funny In A Foreign Language’ Review
8.6
GENRE: Rock
YEAR OF RELEASE: 2022Take a good look at the artwork above. In it, The 1975’s frontman Matty Healy appears dancing with bent knees on top of an abandoned, destroyed car on the beach. Why? No idea. Healy’s head works in mysterious ways. The photo is a still from the music video for “Part of The Band,” the lead single off their new album, Being Funny In A Foreign Language. In the video, shots of band performing at the beach’s marsh are mixed with Healy talking to children and traveling like a vagrant. Over the last few years, the world has learned to carefully handle Healy’s lyricism and overall persona. From being canceled in the pandemic to making tabloid headlines for dating fellow-musician FKA Twigs to opening a new and unverified profile on Twitter so he could shitpost, Healy and his bandmates have had time to package a record that covers all these topics in the most The 1975 way: debasing their sincerity, shoving blunt and witty lyrics down slinky melodies, and analyzing modern day society with cynicism and brutal honesty. Only this time, they rely less on electrifying pots and pans and more on strings and softer croons.
Upon listening to their previous albums, one always had a false sense that their songs were put together without much preoccupation as if they had worked hard on the arrangements and extracted the cutest, edgiest lyrics from Healy’s mind, and in the end, it all just worked. Sometimes, it felt like they were more concerned about shocking grandmothers and not being labeled as anything—not a boring rock band, not your standard pop product. Intentional or not, their daring lyricism always fueled the band’s ability to dissect postmodernism like no other—2018’s maximalist A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships extensively tackled the effects of the internet on real-life connections, and 2020’s Notes On a Conditional Form had a 22-track run and a speech by climate activist Greta Thunberg as its opening track. On Being Funny In A Foreign Language, they quit being rebels for a while and just give the comfort music that people have come to expect from pop-rock bands in the digital era.
The four-piece becomes more self-aware and critically self-governed, looking inwards from front to back during Being Funny In A Foreign Language’s 44-minute run. The band has also become more concise, betting on fewer tracks and a shorter variety of genres, but maintaining the classic shimmering synths, mawkish guitars, and charming saxophones that made them famous. Following the tradition of self-titled opening tracks, “The 1975” is a straightforward introduction to the environment in which the record takes place and the themes it explores: being part of a generation that spends hours scrolling through social media, drinking Aperol, taking Aderol, turning sadness and diseases into aesthetics, and living through conspiracy theories on Reddit. But contrary to their previous albums, the statement ends there—the following tracks focus on how they personally get through these contemporary problems rather than talking about the issues from the perspective of social commentators.
But then again, they tackle things so stupidly, sarcastically, and at the same time so wisely that listeners can’t resist but agree and smirk along. “Now I’m home, somewhere I don’t like/Eating stuff off of motorbikes,” Healy scoffs on “Part Of The Band,” a song built with violins, bass, and a small dose of snares. It’s hard to find another song out there that sums up the discussion about millennials as well as this one does—it even respectfully makes fun of coffee-loving people who carry tote bags, for Christ’s sake. With which authority does Healy find himself apt to offer such profound criticism on an entire generation? Well, he’s simply one of the people he’s singing about.
The band does drop its on-brand irony and tries to grapple with what the adults are talking about on the news, albeit never losing its sarcastic tone and groovy atmosphere. On “Looking for Somebody (To Love),” they dance through social commentary, reflecting on school mass shootings and toxic masculinity over scintillating new-wave synths, thumping drums, buttery keyboards, and syrupy saxophones. “Somebody pickin’ up the body of somebody they were gettin’ to know,” Healy sings, blanketing what might be the heaviest line in the band’s discography with his earnest voice.
Being Funny In A Foreign Language takes its actual shape once it brings back the slinky melodies that The 1975 are famous for but in an altered version—a folk one. “I was in a big Paul Simon phase,” Healy said about the creation of “All I Need to Hear,” a piano ballad recorded in one take. By the time “Wintering,” the following track, starts, there’s an undeniable ’60s folk influence that hangers over these two songs, even in Healy’s cadence, which resembles the story-telling speech style of Simon and Bob Dylan. Later track “When We Are Together” is as folk as it gets, with its story taking place in New York and its characters moving in together and then breaking up—there’s nothing more relatable than sharing a place with your significant other in this real estate market, where rental prices go up every time the sun goes down. But this wouldn’t be a The 1975 record without some genre-hopping. On “Human Too,” Healy expresses the pressure he feels for being in a panoptic discipline system, constantly self-examining his actions and words, and recognizing his weaknesses and frailties over an R&B-tinged song. On “About You,” the band opts for a huge hall reverb while Healey sings in a lower register on top of strings and hazy guitars, tilting the song in a shoe gaze direction.
Healy will likely never call himself a genius—and most likely neither will the world—but there’s a lot of brilliance in these lyrics and in the way they present so many matters with such cynicism and undeniable truth. The 1975 has always written this way—on their 2018 song “Give Yourself a Try,” they sang about getting STDs at 27 and becoming spiritually enlightened at 29—and though a bit different, Being Funny In A Foreign Language is not precisely a mega shift in the band’s music. Still, the record does make their approach more accessible and their crazy words more sound.
Listen to Being Funny In A Foreign Language:
The third album by the Canadian band proves their ability to grind their influences into their own blissful version of shoegaze dream pop.