I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It

What they’ve made is a bold body of work that sounds effortless and odd and sophisticated. What they do next is likely to be stadium-filling and bonkers and brilliant, but it matters little when what they're doing now is so sensational.

Healy may get lost in his head, but I Like It... is a delightful, overshare-y trip that celebrates a new era of boundaryless pop.

I Like It When You Sleep is 17 tracks long. By any standard, it’s an expansive collection, riddled with caution-to-the-wind sonic experiments and bits of alchemical production flourishes. Surprisingly, though, there aren’t any significant misfires here.

While this follow-up shares some of the annoying mannerisms that curdled one’s enjoyment of The 1975’s 2013 debut, it’s ultimately a much more enjoyable and considered work, one which starts to deliver on the immense hype that accompanied their emergence.

As the title implies, it may take the 1975 a while to get to the point on I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It, but when they do, the results are revelatory.

Any record that burrows as deep into your psyche as I Like It... should be considered essential. It’s hugely clever and wryly funny, too.

They decided that they could completely renovate their brand and rely on their fanbase to follow; lucky for them, it’s working. It’s a new era, and the 1975 are taking you with them.

You’re left with an album that fancies itself as a challenging work of art, but turns out to be a collection of fantastic pop songs full of interesting, smart lyrics, but also peppered with self-conscious lunges for a gravitas it doesn’t really need.

As ambitious an album as you will hear from a young British group and they mostly pull it off. [Mar 2016, p.104]

These songs have strong, familiar features, but they build off of one another; every one of them is full of hyperactive, bats**t detail that makes it immediately attributable to this band alone.

In the hands of other bands, this slippery focus might feel like genre whiplash or a bait-and-switch. Yet the album coheres shockingly well, thanks to smart sequencing and the vocal progression of frontman Matt Healy.

What these songs share, the pairing of Healy's witty, bratty lyricism with athletic and adventurous musicianship, prove that this band is comfortable moving in all directions at once.

Overblown and occasionally excruciating, I Love It...'s fearless perversity nonetheless puts most "alternative" bands to shame. [Apr 2016, p.67]

Given some judicious editing, this could have been a truly great album; as it stands, we'll have to settle for just really, really good.

When you sleep... has a much more distinct and iconoclastic character than their slick debut, drawing from the effervescent, percolating polish of early '80s Hot 100 pop that they flirted with on "Heart Out.".... That doesn't mean that When you sleep is consistent by any stretch. It's 75 minutes long, which could mostly be solved by trimming the four (!) lengthy ambient tracks on the record.

We get a less focused effort, with peaks and troughs in its quality. Yet the best tracks off the album are better than any of the band’s previous work. It’s just a shame that the weaker songs fall below the standard The 1975 set for themselves.

Even though there are intriguing depths behind the 1975’s worship of surfaces, I Like It When You Sleep feels a little like what pop albums used to feel like--the hits, padded out by filler.

Trim the fat and you’d wind up with a special record, but with those bizarre moments gone, The 1975 would also lose some of their bombastic charm.

Tracks such as the title song and She Lays Down are redundant, bringing down what is otherwise a brave and eclectic comeback from The 1975, one that is sure to divide opinion once again.

Despite opening big, bright and airtight, I Like It When You Sleep... gets boring-melty during dream-gaze reveries like "Please Be Naked" and "Lostmyhead." Even so, when they hit the right kind of moody sheen ("Somebody Else," "Loving Someone"), the 1975 are an enjoyable balance of desire and distraction.

Ambitious but muddled, throughout they veer from awful to the gently compelling. [Apr 2016, p.86]

There’s plenty of filler here, but at least it all works toward trying to inject some humanity back into the world of buzz-worthy pop music.