By the time The 1975 sat down to make a second record, they'd already answered the only question that matters commercially: could the debut have been a fluke. It wasn't. Their self-titled first album had entered the UK chart at No. 1 and become the band's best-selling record at home, and they'd filled London's Royal Albert Hall by 2014 — the kind of booking that turns a buzz band into an actual going concern. Then, in June 2015, they vanished: the band deleted their social media accounts entirely, and Matty Healy began seeding cryptic posts built from lyrics no one had heard yet. When the accounts reappeared, it was with a blurred image captioned "The 1975 — 2," a rebrand disguised as a riddle. The record that followed — seventeen tracks, seventy-three minutes, ranging from post-rock instrumentals to full stadium pop — was an almost defiantly maximalist follow-up to a tight, radio-shaped first album. Buried in the middle of all that scale and glitter, at track ten, sat something much quieter.

What you're hearing

"Somebody Else" is a breakup song that refuses the two easiest exits — neither pure longing nor clean anger — and sits instead in the more embarrassing space between them. Healy's opening admission sets the tone: he doesn't want his ex-partner's body back, but hates the idea of someone else having it. The quieter verses work through jealousy mediated by distance and technology rather than a physical rival — looking through someone as they look through their phone. Where the singles around it — "Love Me," "UGH!," "The Sound" — all revelled in irony and cabaret provocation, this song is gentle, unhurried, and, in one contemporary critic's phrase, "spellbinding" and "baffling" in almost the same breath.

A shift in how the record got built

"Somebody Else" is a full-band composition — Healy, Daniel, Adam Hann, and Ross MacDonald are all credited as writers — produced by Healy and Daniel alongside Mike Crossey, running 5 minutes 47 seconds in C major at a steady 100 BPM, unusually long and unhurried for what became one of the album's most visible singles. What's documented, though not confirmed for this specific track, is a real shift in method between the debut and this record: George Daniel has said Crossey embraced the band's own pre-existing production and synth arrangements the second time around, rather than reworking them from scratch, consistent with Daniel's account of building the record's vocal layering from what he's called an "organic version of a vocoder" — recording individual harmony notes by hand rather than processing them artificially, a technique inspired directly by the spatial, chorused vocal production George Daniel has repeatedly traced back to Hugh Padgham's work with Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel. Neither interview names "Somebody Else" specifically when describing that technique — the documented examples are other tracks on the record — so this is stated as how the album as a whole was built, not a certainty about this individual song.

How it's done

Writing a contradiction without resolving it, componentized:

STATE THE CONTRADICTION IN THE FIRST LINE: not wanting someone back, but hating the idea of them with someone else, is presented flatly, with no narrative frame explaining it away — the tension is the opening statement, not a twist revealed later LET A TONAL SWERVE STAY UNRESOLVED: the mid-song turn from confession into sneering bravado split critics hard at release, and the song doesn't try to smooth that reaction over — the whiplash is doing the emotional work the lyric alone can't PLACE THE QUIETEST SONG AT THE RECORD'S MOST BURIED POSITION, ON PURPOSE: track ten of seventeen, deep inside an album otherwise built for maximum scale, gave the song room to work as a genuine tonal contrast rather than competing directly with the bigger statements DISTINGUISH WHAT'S DOCUMENTED FROM WHAT'S INFERRED: the album's vocal-layering technique is well sourced in general — but naming it as fact for one specific song it was never directly confirmed on would overstate the record

The transferable lesson: an emotionally contradictory song doesn't need its contradiction resolved to work — sometimes stating an uncomfortable, self-canceling feeling plainly, and trusting the arrangement to carry it, is the more honest choice than smoothing it into something tidier.

The Moment

Healy finishes writing the song and immediately knows: "As soon as I finished writing it, I was like, 'This is a tune.'" His most nakedly personal songs, he's said, tend to land harder than the performative ones.

What it did

Released as a single on 15 February 2016, "Somebody Else" peaked at a modest No. 55 on the UK Singles Chart but has since passed a billion streams on Spotify — a slow-burn trajectory that mirrors the song's own reluctant, unresolved emotional register. The music video, directed by Tim Mattia at London's Alexandra Road Estate, ends on a twist: the man Healy's character has been watching his ex-lover leave with turns out to be Healy himself, in a wig and dress — a literal staging of a song that never lets its narrator separate cleanly from the person he's trying to let go of.

Sources & further listening

  1. Matty Healy's interviews on the song's writing and emotional intent, including his 2016 BBC backstage interview.
  2. George Daniel's interviews on the album's vocal production technique.
  3. Core listening: "Somebody Else," "Love Me," "UGH!"