The 1975

Notes on a Conditional Form

Notes On a Conditional Form isn’t the most important thing in the world right now, however it’s easily the most interesting and confusing major release by an arena-selling guitar band in a long while. The UK’s best band continue to delight and bewilder in equal measure.

At 22 tracks and 80 minutes long, Notes on a Conditional Form is the band’s longest and arguably most daring record, yet it is also their most understated work—a reflective and oddly sober re-evaluation of Healy’s persona which contains much of his funniest and most wistful material to date.

There are moments of brilliance ... Had they filtered the cacophony of ideas a little more, ‘Notes…’ could have matched ‘A Brief Inquiry…’ as a modern-day classic; as it stands, its legacy looks set to be slightly more conditional.

It might not live up to its lofty goals, but the sheer amount of daring on Notes on a Conditional Form solidifies the four guitar-wielding dudes of the 1975 as the biggest, boldest, and brashest purveyors of something resembling what we used to call rock n’ roll.

Notes on a Conditional Form is an explosion of ideas—some bad, but many good, all worth getting lost in for at least a short while.

Notes on a Conditional Form is a fantastic 12 track, 45-minute album. It’s just a shame that The 1975 decided to make it into a 22 track, 80 minute one.

Though it ends with the balmy sentiment of “Don’t Worry” and “Guys” (The 1975’s love song to itself), this is an 80-minute shrug of the shoulders, a rudderless surrender to the flow.

It makes Notes on a Conditional Form a curious thing, an album whose flaws are inherent in what it sets out to do: music for the no-filter generation, with all the good and bad that entails.

The 1975 have created a very bloated version of A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships, which means that it has some really impressive moments of electronic experimentation and upbeat indie-rock gems, but also a large swath of songs that could have been left to a future EP or b-side collection.

Ultimately, Notes On A Conditional Form is an album that shows The 1975 indulging in their best and worst tendencies. There’s some fantastic stuff here, but you have to dig for it a little too much.

A Brief Inquiry is a hard album to top, and Notes is, perhaps, the most disjointed and unclassifiable of the 1975’s works. It serves best, perhaps, as a long and intermittently lovely outro to that defining record.

Notes On a Conditional Form seems more preoccupied with perception and the potential to legacy-build than it does with lasting songs. It’s an album that would never have been made without the cameras rolling or thumbs tweeting.

Notes On A Conditional Form is a jarring and fatiguing listening experience.

There's very little rhyme or reason to Notes on a Conditional Form.

Flat, directionless and inessential, where its forebears felt vital, worthy of devoting a life to. For a band with proven dexterity in deftly capturing the nuances and quick changes of contemporary conversation, it is disheartening to witness them with nearly nothing of note to say.

A 22-track-long parade of stream-of-conscious self-indulgence ... Perhaps if they'd cared a little more the result wouldn't have been such a smug farrago in which each track grates against the next like rusted gears.