The 1975 is a British pop-rock band who has seen a large amount of success over the course of this past decade. Coming off of their last commercial album, 2018’s “A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships,”, they have released this new album titled, “Notes on a Conditional Form.” This album is 22 tracks long and has a run time of around 80 minutes, and it carries many of the ideas over from their previous record. 

Over the course of their last few releases, The 1975 have been pursuing a more alternative sound with “A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships” being their most experimental project yet. This album does continue to follow the band’s forrey into more experimental music and has proven to be the band’s most adventurous album yet, but sadly, this album is a mess. 

This album has some beautiful moments and high peaks such as the pop anthem, “If You’re Too Shy,” but it lacks focus and is bloated with half-baked ideas and underwritten songs. This album also suffers from a lack of consistency in both themes and style, leaving the album feeling like an overblown mess. 

A large number of these songs are derivative, such as the intro, “The 1975,” which features a spoken word section by environmental activist Greta Thunberg on the dangers of climate change, but this topic is not directly touched on again anywhere else on the album, leaving the intro feeling completely meaningless in the long run. It makes it seem like the band only threw this message from Thunberg in there to appear “woke” but it just ends feeling shallow and pretentious. This happens many times over the course of the runtime, leaving this new project sounding like a loose collection of unfocused, half baked tracks instead of a cohesive album. I Rate this album a 5/10, overall.