The 1975 – "In one song there's nine guitar parts going on simultaneously"

How the two-guitar dynamic works in The 1975-by the band's lead player and secret metalhead Adam Hann

- By Stan Bull

It's a grey Monday morning, and Adam Hann, the lead guitarist of indie-pop behemoths The 1975, is reflecting on the burnout caused from recording the band's fourth album, 2020's Notes On A Conditional Form. "We decided to do our third and fourth albums back to back," he says. "When you're on tour, you're finishing at 1.00 am or whatever, and then it was like, 'Time to get working on this album!' It just proved very challenging," he sighs. "There's a reason people make albums in the traditional way, and that's because it works..."

The Covid-19 pandemic forced the group to release Notes On A Conditional Form to a locked-down audience worldwide, though it nevertheless went straight to number 1 in the UK. An 80-minute, 22-song epic, Notes... saw the group experimenting with everything from stoner rock and Americana to UK garage and IDM.

After taking some time off, the four members of The 1975 - Hann, vocalist/guitarist Matty Healy, bassist Ross MacDonald and drummer George Daniel - regrouped to record a shorter, more intimate-sounding album, Being Funny In A Foreign Language, which was released earlier this month. Trying to get the very best out of themselves as both writers and players, the group teamed up with superstar producer Jack Antonoff, acclaimed for his work with big-name artists such as Taylor Swift, St. Vincent and Haim. "I think we'd had this really difficult experience with the fourth album," Adam says, "and I think we just wanted someone who's made a lot of albums and knew what they were doing. Someone who had a different process in the studio..."