Album Anniversaries: The 1975’s ‘I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful yet So Unaware of It’ Still Puts Us In Our Feels
Five years later, The 1975’s I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful yet So Unaware of It continues to leave listeners wondering, “Matty Healy, who hurt you?”
Written by Myah Taylor
Photos courtesy of Polydor Records
Since The 1975 waltzed onto the scene in 2013 with the groovy stoner anthem, “Chocolate,” its members have grown increasingly disillusioned with … everything. A quick listen to the band’s provocative 2018 single “Love It If We Made It” is enough to convince anyone of the group’s persistent nihilism.
But before lead singer and chief songwriter Matty Healy lost all hope in humanity, or his band gained the respect of Pitchfork and other top critics, he fell out of love and drowned in all the emotions that characterize heartbreak. A sort of companion album to The 1975’s self-titled debut, the band’s 2016 sophomore LP I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful yet So Unaware of It embodies the dichotomy that is Healy: painfully apathetic, yet incredibly vulnerable.
This contrast works rather well in the album’s lead single, “Love Me,” a slick ‘80s tribute track with punchy lyrics. Dripping with sarcasm, the song is an impassioned but passive message to the band’s zealous fanbase. “Love me,” Healy belts in the chorus, before he sings, less enthusiastically, “If that’s what you want to do.”
“Love Me” is a fascinating meditation on what it’s like to walk a tightrope between not caring what people think, yet wanting validation all the same. In the band’s typical fashion, Healy’s delivery of the lyrics is unintelligible, but the glitzy synths and zingy guitar make the track shine. But once the throbbing rhythms are peeled back, the lyrics reveal themselves to be quite profound, albeit sporadic. Healy sings in the second verse:
You've been reading 'bout yourself on a plane, fame for a change
Caught up in fashion, Karcrashian panache
These musings on fame in the digital age offered a taste of the band’s 2018 project, A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, which fixates more on social issues. It also may have garnered the band some secretly craved acclaim outside of Tumblr fan blogs — not that The 1975’s members would admit that they wanted it. Around the time of “Love Me”’s release, the group wrote in a letter to fans: “Too many artists care what people think — we are for the community.”
Regardless of how Healy (a self-described narcissist) really feels, the singer is quite good at putting up fronts: sincerity is scary for him, after all. So, maybe that’s why he wears a brave face in “A Change of Heart,” I Like It When You Sleep‘s melancholic breakup track with lyrics so bitter it makes one wonder what went so wrong in Healy’s relationship. “For goodness sake / I wasn’t told you’d be this cold / Now it’s my time to depart and I just had a change of heart,” he sings, as he recounts his failed romance over whining synths and operatic hums.
The track is really about Healy’s romantic aspirations, detailed in the band’s debut, not coming to fruition. In “The City,” a drum-led bop from the band’s first LP, the frontman talks about finding love in a metropolis. But in “A Change of Heart,” he sings that he “never found love in the city.” Instead, the singer reveals that he cries in the car and soaks in self-pity. In “Robbers,” a track from The 1975’s debut, Healy likens a love interest to a supermodel when he opens with, “She had a face straight out a magazine.” Continuing this motif in “A Change of Heart,” he later describes how his former flame’s beauty has faded for him: “You used to have a face straight out of a magazine / Now you just look like anyone.” The biting lyrics only prove the pervasiveness of his pain, even as he feigns indifference.
But Healy and his band haven’t been fooling anyone: they do care about their professional ambition and about love. In “Somebody Else,” a staple of the group’s repertoire, sleepy synths, piano, and a toe-tapping drum beat accompany Healy as he ditches his pride and gets confessional in the chorus:
I don’t want your body
But I hate to think about you with somebody else
Our love has gone cold
You’re intertwining your soul with somebody else
Still, he’s able to distract from what is really going on in that heart and head of his. At face value, “UGH!” is just another funky track, but it’s “Chocolates”’s darker counterpart, a story about drug addiction that Healy continues to tell to this day. “And you’re the only thing that’s going on in my mind / Taking over my life a second time,” he sings, not about an ex, but his cocaine addiction, another toxic relationship in his life.
I Like It When You Sleep isn’t all so heavy, though. “She’s American” puts Healy’s wit and sense of humor on display (“If she says I’ve got to fix my teeth / Then she’s so American”). “This Must Be My Dream” is a soaring love letter to ‘80s synthpop and some distant fantasy girl: “Let me tell you ‘bout this girl/ I thought she’d rearrange my world.” Pulsating standout “The Sound” is good for any dance party, and a reminder that the band does know how to have fun.
But the existential crisis is always bubbling under the surface — it’s the Matty Healy special. At war with love and navigating drug addiction, the frontman also grapples with religion, a touchy subject for him. “I used to be an ATHEIST,” Healy told Genius in 2018. “Now I’m just an atheist.” He revealed a duality later in the interview: “I want salvation just as much as the next person. I envy the faithful.”
In 2016, it seemed that way. He entertained faith, or at least the notion of it, in the gospel-influenced ballad “If I Believe You,” where he pleads for Jesus to reveal himself. After he admits he’s got an infected “God-shaped hole,” a conflicted Healy talks to the divine in a later verse:
I'll be your child if you insist
I mean if it was you that made my body
You probably shouldn't have made me atheist
Cuts such as “If I Believe You” are exactly why I Like It When You Sleep is so compelling; it’s 17 songs of a man contemplating the intricate facets of his existence. While The 1975’s sophomore effort was a mirror of the band's debut in its vintage style and aesthetic, it showed Healy and his bandmates were capable of much more. With more complex themes and sonic experimentation, I Like It When You Sleep foreshadowed the band's future and predated the growing trend in music of cloaking misery in the glamorous sounds of a past decade.
And if the more politically-minded A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships came as a result of not caring what others have to say (or caring too much), I Like It When You Sleep was the start of this progression. Of course, the world was changing too at the time of its release. In 2016, A reality TV star ascended to the presidency of the United States and Brexit created division in the United Kingdom, among other worldly happenings. Healy’s progressively grim outlook made sense. Two years later, he’d sing about the failure of modernity in the aforementioned “Love It If We Made It,” which in hindsight, is quite prophetic. Amid a global pandemic and other crises, the world is imploding just as Healy, the nihilist, predicted.
While I Like It When You Sleep depicts The 1975 frontman as weary and scorned, there’s this undeniable feeling that part of him does want to believe in humanity, love, God — all of it. But half a decade after he flirted with earnestness, he still seems comfortable keeping up a facade and wearing leather pants, of course.