Guitarist Adam Hann hasn't dressed up what the two records before this one cost the band. Reflecting shortly after this album's release, he described making A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships and Notes on a Conditional Form back to back, with almost no gap between them — finishing a tour at one in the morning and immediately starting work on the next record. "It just proved very challenging," he's said. "There's a reason people make albums in the traditional way, and that's because it works." After the pandemic forced Notes out into a locked-down world anyway, the band took real time off — and when they came back, everything about the process changed.

What you're hearing

At eleven tracks, this is by far the shortest and most direct record in the band's catalog — a deliberate reaction, by Healy's own account, against the instinct that made every previous album feel like it needed to contain the whole of who he was. What replaces the sprawl is a rougher, more human-sounding band: performances that breathe and slightly shift rather than sitting in a rigid digital grid, guitar tones that lean warm and analog rather than processed, and a sense throughout that four musicians are actually in a room together rather than assembling a track piece by piece.

Why they finally brought in outside help

For the first time since 2016's I Like It When You Sleep, The 1975 handed part of the producer's chair to someone outside the band: Jack Antonoff, the Grammy-winning producer behind records for Taylor Swift, St. Vincent, and HAIM. Hann was direct about why: after the difficult experience of the fourth album, the band wanted someone who'd made a lot of records and knew what they were doing — a different process, a safe pair of hands, someone to help carry the load. Matty Healy's account of how the partnership actually formed is less about hiring a producer than acquiring a friend who happened to be one — the two started talking about other people's records, became close, and only then started talking about The 1975's own. Healy was careful to frame Antonoff's role as an addition rather than a handover: "A 1975 record wouldn't be a 1975 record if it wasn't done by me and George as the writers and the directors."

Hann framed Antonoff's biggest contribution as a working method, not just a name attached to the credits: "Jack actually works in quite an analogue world," he's said, contrasting it with the "digital world" the band's third and fourth albums had been built entirely inside — recording everything in the box. Stepping away from that, in Hann's words, was meant to "give it some humanity."

Playing live in Peter Gabriel's studio

Most of the album came together at Real World Studios in Box, Wiltshire — Peter Gabriel's studio, and, according to Healy, a room he'd dreamed about working in since childhood. He's called it simply the best-looking and best-sounding room in music production, and the band moved in for roughly two months. The pitch to themselves, in Healy's telling, was blunt: they had real instruments, they'd been a band for twenty years, and anyone could make anything on a computer — so they went into a room instead and made a record with those instruments. It's the same room, and by extension the same production lineage, this library has already traced back to Hugh Padgham's work with Gabriel himself — a strange, direct thread connecting the gated drum sound that defined 1980s pop production to a 2022 record chasing exactly the opposite instinct: fewer layers, more room.

Hann's account of the actual sessions describes a genuinely different process than anything the band had done before: playing together, live, in one take, rather than building songs part by part. Real World's control room, he's said, is big enough to have everything set up simultaneously — drums, guitars, keys, vocal booth — rather than the usual studio rotation of recording one instrument, tearing the setup down, then recording the next. Leaving everything up let the band play together and record that performance as the actual genesis of the track. Antonoff's guiding principle, per Hann, was speed and instinct over refinement: your first instinct is your best instinct, do a couple of takes, then move on — staying away from heavy editing and heavy comping to keep the human feel intact.

How it's done

Deliberately reversing a band's own production instincts, componentized:

DIAGNOSE WHAT THE OLD METHOD ACTUALLY COST: the band didn't just decide to change things for novelty — Hann named the specific problem (an exhausting, all-digital, in-the-box workflow across two straight albums) before choosing the opposite approach BRING IN OUTSIDE JUDGMENT ONLY WHEN THE CORE STAYS INTACT: Healy was explicit that Antonoff was additive, not a replacement for the band's own writing and direction — outside help arrived as a third voice, not a new authority CHOOSE A ROOM THAT PHYSICALLY ENABLES THE METHOD: Real World's oversized control room wasn't incidental to the "play live together" goal — it was the specific physical condition that made leaving a full backline set up simultaneously actually possible CAP THE NUMBER OF TAKES ON PURPOSE: "a couple of takes, then move on" is a deliberate limit, not a shortcut — comping and heavy editing were named directly as the things being avoided, because they were understood to erase exactly the quality being chased

The transferable lesson: reversing a production instinct that's stopped serving a project usually requires more than good intentions — it requires naming the specific cost of the old method, and then choosing a room, a collaborator, and a take-limit that structurally prevent slipping back into it.

The Moment

"Happiness"'s signature guitar solo was originally a fuzzed-out electric part, styled after a Daft Punk record. In the room, it felt too obvious — so the band recorded it on acoustic guitar instead, something they'd never tried before.

The songs

"Part of the Band," the lead single, nearly got left on the cutting-room floor — Healy had written it as a straightforward E Street Band-style rock song and all but forgotten about it until the band reached the studio, where they stripped the drums out entirely and rebuilt it around strings and stream-of-consciousness talking, a deliberate continuation of the band's habit of opening albums with something built to unsettle expectations. "All I Need to Hear" leans on an unusual signal chain rather than a traditional amp — a guitar DI'd straight into a preamp with no amp involved, run through a Chandler Limited Abbey Road TG unit driven to maximum for its distinctive tone. And "About You" deliberately continues the story "Robbers" began nearly a decade earlier — the same characters, now viewed through nostalgia rather than heat-of-the-moment romance, its production choice going, in Healy's own words, "full Phil Spector": a wall of reverb, with string arrangements supplying gothic atmosphere despite the song's major key.

What it did

The album debuted at No. 1 in the UK — the band's fifth consecutive chart-topper there — and reached No. 7 in the US, earning a Brit Award nomination for Album of the Year in 2023. More than any chart position, though, it marked a genuine method reversal for a band whose entire identity, up to this point, had been built on George Daniel's laptop-first, build-it-alone-then-bring-it-to-the-band approach. Choosing, deliberately, to set that method aside for eleven songs — trading control for the risk and humanity of four people playing at once in a room — produced the most direct, least fussed-over record of the band's career, at exactly the moment two maximalist albums in a row had made that kind of directness feel impossible.

Sources & further listening

  1. Adam Hann's interviews with Guitar World and Premier Guitar on the album's recording method and gear.
  2. Matty Healy's interviews with Minnesota Public Radio's The Current on the Jack Antonoff partnership and the Real World sessions.
  3. Core listening: "Part of the Band," "Happiness," "About You."