Single Review: The Escapist Delight of The 1975’s ‘All I Need to Hear’

It is a new decade for The 1975. On the band’s new single “All I Need to Hear” off of their upcoming album “Being Funny in a Foreign Language,” The 1975 step out of their comfort zone of dense lyrics and murky morality to assert the redemptive power of naïve affection. For a band whose discography on love is most expressive in situations of romantic near-misses, “All I Need to Hear” is refreshingly optimistic while still maintaining The 1975’s signature hint of self-deprecating irony.

On the single, frontman Matty Healy croons about his desire to be loved in a voice dripping with reverb. He rejects the world around him — friends he “do[esn’t] want to meet” and the “crowds and cheers” of touring — in favor of his one plea: “tell me you love me, ‘cause that’s all that I need to hear.” The hardest part about writing the record, Healy confesses in the music video introduction, was that he “had to be willing to say, like, cringe shit.” But for a band whose version of a breakup song contains dense lyrics like “at your best, you're intermediately versed in your own feelings,” the simplicity and cliché of Healy’s request renders it all the more earnest.

As The 1975 die-hards are quick to mention, frontman Matty Healy debuted “All I Need to Hear” in a slightly monotonous opening performance for a Phoebe Bridgers concert in October 2021. Perhaps the song was too new, or perhaps Bridgers’s audience was thrown off by a song that didn’t make them want to cry, but the audience reacted tepidly to the song, save for a few cries of “We love you Matty” after the chorus.

The single version, released last Wednesday, showcased why The 1975 is a band, not a Matty Healy solo project. In the music video, which sees the band return to the studio where they recorded the album, Healy mentions that the band recorded the song live. Indeed, the band’s chemistry shines on the recording; guest pianist Jamie Squire and guitarist Adam Hann cultivate a unified and open groove above drummer George Daniel’s ultra-simplistic 6/8 drumbeat. Even Healy’s instruction to Daniel to “do the hi-hats” before the second verse made it to the final recording, reminding listeners that The 1975 does in fact have four members despite Healy’s almost overpowering swagger.

The rest of the music video exemplifies what makes “All I Need to Hear” unique for The 1975. The video opens with three minutes of Healy, alone outside of Real World Studios in rural England, opening on the creative process and the band’s history. He then abruptly reveals the camera crews around him, invoking the artifice of solitude to question the veracity of any modern creative endeavor — a move typical of the dichotomy between self-critical and self-indulgent that defines much of The 1975’s discography. With “All I Need to Hear,” The 1975 rejects this paradigm altogether, taking refuge in the “cringe shit” of love. No chord is unexpected, no melody surprising; the entire composition is escapist simplicity in its purest form.

After the bridge, the third verse kicks off with some well-pitched guitar feedback and expansive piano chords, signaling a slight tonal and lyrical turn from the pure toward the band’s tongue-in-cheek pessimism. Healy’s pining grows increasingly desperate with the lines “reply to my message / pick up my calls,” before he fully breaks down: “I don’t care if you’re insincere / just tell me what I want to hear.” It’s easy to miss between Healy’s mellifluous tone and the euphonic 2-5-1s that support him, but this lyric reveals that all of the loving cheesiness of the song’s first act is yet unattained, and the accompanying musical euphoria is merely aspirational.

Healy opens his music video monologue by monologuing “What is it, three chords and the truth or whatever they say? Well there’s way more than three chords, but at least I was telling the truth.” On “All I Need to Hear,” the affection is sincere, and so is the desperation. It is both musically true to the classic aesthetic of The 1975’s recent style as well as lyrically honest — the lyrics yearn for meaningful connections for artists surrounded by a superficial world of “crowds and cheers.” If the seven unreleased songs on “Being Funny in a Foreign Language” are as timeless and subtle as this single, The 1975 may just have composed their most thoughtful and listenable album yet.