Song of the Day: The 1975, "If You're Too Shy (Let Me Know)"

Chuck Klosterman once half-jokingly wrote about how Radiohead’s Kid A might have predicted 9/11. I don’t think Thom Yorke had any sort of inside info about the comings and goings of international terrorists, but I do acknowledge it’s kind of wild that album feels like what life was in the immediate aftermath of that attack, even though Kid A arrived nearly a full year before the event. Kid A wasn’t a response to 9/11, but it felt like one, and retroactively feels like the soundtrack to life in New York in the aftermath. (The same could also be said of PJ Harvey’s Stories From the City, Stories From The Sea, which also came out in the fall of 2000, is all about urban isolation, and features vocals from Yorke.)

In a similar vein, I sometimes think Matty Healy of the 1975 anticipated the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the most celebrated tracks from the band’s fourth album Notes on a Conditional Form is the single “If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know).” It’s a nostalgic bit of rugged ‘80s synth pop that always reminded me of the slinkier moments of INXS. The song is all about a relationship that plays out entirely online, and though it was released in April 2020 and conceived even earlier than that, it’s easy to absorb it as a definitive lockdown anthem that captured how weird it was to try to maintain interpersonal relationships while isolated in Zoom windows.

I had been a singles-only fan of the 1975 but Notes on a Conditional Form is the album that sold me on them. (Ironically, I once declared them “Better than Radiohead” in a social media post, which resulted in copious ribbing.) Notes was the first piece of vinyl I purchased during our self-imposed quarantine, which is why it’s the soundtrack to both the early days of the pandemic and also my son’s babyhood (he was born in February 2020, just in time for the world to fall apart). It’s one of those records that only really existed for me in my house, so it was somewhat jarring a few years later when I heard “If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)” at the supermarket. It feels weird to go back to it now, much in the same way it’s strange to try to take in those Radiohead and PJ Harvey albums, but I have yet to tire of Healy’s somewhat scummy chorus “Maybe I would like you better if you took off your clothes?” (As a broad proponent of nudity, I can’t help but stan.) Notes on a Conditional Form exists in a very specific pocket of my personal canon, but I do love that it somehow broke out enough to get some spins in Safeway.