Notes on a Conditional Form

Notes on a Conditional Form is a fantastic 12 track, 45-minute album. It’s just a shame that The 1975 decided to make it into a 22 track, 80 minute one. There’s certainly enough going on to recommend repeat listens, but the quality level waxes and wanes so much throughout that it won’t take you too long to find your favorites and start returning to just those.

Notes on a Conditional Form is The 1975 as we know them – just good enough to not be bad.

When they're playing to their strengths, the 1975 provide a robust platform for Healey’s witty, romantic, confused yet always committed interrogation of the essential artifice of his role as reluctant rock star with a conscience, shouting into a void already filled with the echoes of other voices. Like many double albums, there is a fine single album here fighting to get out. If only.

The tracks that follow are, simply put, eclectic. At times, almost frustratingly so.

This album takes a different, more meandering approach compared to Brief Inquiry, and that may be its greatest weakness: Notes on a Conditional Form is simply too long. ... Still, where Notes works, the 1975 prove themselves to be surprisingly efficient craftsmen, even as they sound ridiculous.

It makes Notes on a Conditional Form a curious thing, an album whose flaws are inherent in what it sets out to do: music for the no-filter generation, with all the good and bad that entails.

Earnestness often rules. ... They're better at slushy, Radio 1 epics and louder, brasher tracks. [Jul 2020, p.78]

Where A Brief Inquiry… excelled due to its exceptional pop songwriting and well-calculated sonic departures, Notes… is far too ambitious and self-aware (“Will I live and die in a band?”) for its own good.

It's unwieldy, cheesy, overlong, confusing and, just occasionally, inspired. [Jul 2020, p.25]