The 1975 have shared their latest preview of Being Funny in a Foreign Language (Oct. 14, Dirty Hit), a stately love song titled “All I Need to Hear.” It’s the fourth single from the band’s much-anticipated Notes on a Conditional Form follow-up after “Part of the Band,” “Happiness” and “I’m in Love with You.”
Following the ebullient, danceable guitar-pop of those last three tracks, “All I Need to Hear” finds The 1975 in slow-jam mode, bringing somber piano and Matty Healy’s vocals to the forefront. Gentle electric guitar and pedal steel flicker here and there, with poignant strings eventually entering the mix—all while Healy emphasizes the single-mindedness of his love, to which all else pales in comparison.
Speaking to Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 on Wednesday, Healy said of “All I Need to Hear”:
What I’ve struggled [with] is like this song, what does it say? It’s like I don’t need music in my ears, I don’t need the crowds and the cheers. Just tell me you love me. That’s all that I need to hear. With “All I Need To Hear,” I don’t know what the barometers are. Some of the barometer[s] are how much it makes you dance or how memorable. There’s something that makes the song stick around. With “All I Need To Hear”, it was one of those songs that I realized quite quickly that “I Couldn’t Be More in Love,” on A Brief Inquiry … and “All I Need To Hear” I think are songs that could be performed better than I can perform them. A lot of my songs require me to perform them, but I think that I’d love to hear Joe Cocker, not that we could have that, but it feels like one of those songs where it’s like I’ve stepped out of the Mattyness of everything. And it’s something that Adele could sing that song, it would make total sense, and she wouldn’t have to talk about jacking off or what the usual subject matter is.
It’s hard to ever know quite what to expect from The 1975, but Being Funny in a Foreign Language certainly has our interest piqued. Paste hailed “Part of the Band” and “Happiness” among the best songs of July and August, respectively.
Check out the “All I Need to Hear” video below, plus a 2013 performance by The 1975 from the Paste archives, and revisit the band’s At Their Very Best Tour dates here. You can preorder Being Funny in a Foreign Language here.