PEOPLE POWER

THE 1975’S NEW ALBUM NOTES ON A CONDITIONAL FORM IS THEIR FOURTH CONSECUTIVE UK NUMBER ONE, AND ANOTHER GENRE‑HOPPING EXTRAVAGANZA. LEAD GUITARIST ADAM HANN EXPLAINS THE THINKING BEHIND THE BAND’S ECLECTIC APPROACH – AND HAILS THE ALBUM’S LEAD SINGLE, PEOPLE, AS “OUR FIRST PROPER ROCK SONG”

- Gregory Adams

The 1975 have always been a hard band to peg. Since the release of their self-titled debut album in 2012, the Manchester-based foursome have embraced a wide swathe of styles — acoustic balladry, bouncy Balearic house, AutoTune-abusing R&B, the slick sheen of 80s pop. Their current album, Notes On A Conditional Form, continues the genre-jumping journey, bringing elements of punk, neo-soul, downtempo electronic music and country into the band’s ever-morphing approach. And in this album’s first single, People, a song mixing T. Rex swagger with black-eyeliner screamo, there is the heaviest-sounding riff they’ve ever recorded – a riffdescribed “ridiculous” by its creator, lead guitarist Adam Hann.

“The main riffin the chorus of People, that’s one of those jokey heavy riffs you play for fun, you know?” Hann says of the garage-glam anthem’s origins, adding that its numbskullsimple groove was regularly goofed-on during soundchecks before the band’s frontman Matt Healy suggested they maximize its potential for their new LP. Hann concedes that People may be The 1975’s “first proper rock song,” but the beneath-the-fingernail grime of its guitar tone first cropped up on the otherwise sugary Give Yourself A Try from 2018’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, which yielded a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Song the following year, leaving the band, in Hann’s words, “super confused as hell”. In both cases, the guitarist got dirty by cranking the overdrive on an Audio Kitchen Little Chopper head and then distorting the mic channel with a Thermionic Culture: Culture Vulture processor.