I’ve heard it in songs before too - in the “doing just fine” of “Mr Brightside,” the song that held my jealousy and inadequacy before “Somebody Else” did. I’ve heard that change in the tone of my own voice so many times this year. You think the change in your tone, taking a slightly different tactic - “ come on baby” - you think it’ll work. In the space between the first and second “come on baby” lives the realisation that this person - the one you need and want but hate and want to forget - they don’t believe you, they’ve moved on, you’re never going to convince them. It’s also the comfort in familiarity, how it shows me to myself. An invasion of my subconscious telling me that they understand. But the core comfort is the repeated “I know”: the way a familiar person appears in a dream. It’s every kind of comfort I need, like stocking up on food and drink and clothes and blankets and medicine when I’m sick. I feel comforted and powerful in my loneliness when I’m listening to it: The way it all leads to the shouts of “fuck that get money,” the final and definitive kiss-off to love. The cold hits my cheeks as the warm layers of synthesisers chime inevitably. I leave a bar and although it’s still early it’s already dark. I still find parts of myself stuck in its glaring reflection some ten months after its release, but I find clarity in the immediate effect it had on me, one of immense rapture and internal conflict.Ĭlaire Biddles: It was winter when I first heard it and it’s winter now. It recalls how I spent a good chunk of my early 20s: walking along empty boardwalks and towering skyscrapers late at night, listening to the ’80s favorites I’d lose myself to every single Thursday night on a dancefloor in the back of a dive bar. “Somebody Else” continues in the great contemporary tradition of solitary soliloquies along midnight city landscapes, immortalized by one of Healy’s surrogate fathers.

How could you possibly articulate about a song that struck a buried nerve, knocked you down on all fours, and engulfed you from the ground up? Well, a few things: For someone who, to me, embodies intoxicating lust and desire to lay their compulsions and contradictions bare feels glorious in its romanticized grandeur. Josh Winters: I don’t even know where to start with this one. In place of Amnesty Week, this year The Singles Jukebox will review every song off The 1975 album…

Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment.

Email (song suggestions/writer enquiries).

The 1975 somebody else meme