In Notes and your last album, you’ve become more political. Greta Thunberg is even featured on Notes. What makes you so willing to push those topics as a band?
The best artists, in my opinion, kind of held a mirror up to the world around them. Artists have shown me how to aspire to live, more so than politicians or world leaders. After I made my first record or my second record, I was just taking up space if I wasn’t making meaningful art.
You’ve talked a lot about The 1975 potentially ending as a musical entity, but you continue.
I think that comes from any writer’s desire for a good ending. This record very much felt like it was going to be some kind of resolve, like some kind of final chapter. It’s a bit like the end of The Graduate. It’s more about new beginnings, and it’s more about reality and it’s more about that there isn’t, kind of, ribbons to put on time.
You’re about to release this album in the middle of a pandemic. It already has some lyrics that reflect the time: “People” and “Frail State of Mind” talk about not going outside. Have these songs developed different meaning for you in the current times?
Yeah. But also, it’s all the same s*** now. I think I was saying, if we don’t change, something is going to make us change. The record just feels justified. I don’t know whether it feels prophetic.
