About You

“About You” is the penultimate song included in The 1975’s fifth studio album “Being Funny in a Foreign Language“.

The song is a musical continuation of the band’s 2013 single “Robbers”, opting for a gothic piece with a huge hall reverb. Collaborating with Warren Ellis, the strings and major key creates an orchestral yet grounded musical arrangement.

It features a duet with Carly Holt, the wife of The 1975’s lead guitarist Adam Hann. Prior to its release, Pitchfork described the song as “moody”, comparing Healy’s vocals to Morrissey.

"Warren Ellis from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds came in to do the arrangement for this song. It was really simple—it sounded like ‘With or Without You’ essentially—and he made it all weird and shoegazey. Even though it’s major key, he gave it this terror, which makes my performance in it a lot less romantic because everything is mushing together, and it’s violent. I think this has a similar vibe to ‘Inside Your Mind’ from the third album. I’ve always loved those kinds of Cronenberg, body-horror analogies, the tension between death and sex. I think that the morose can be quite sensual, and there’s quite a bit of that in my work."

–via Apple Music (October 14, 2022)

Matty Healy actually confirmed this in the Spotify commentary notes for the album:

"Just like I knew that ‘IILWY’ through the video was going to be a continuation of ‘A Change of Heart’, I kinda felt like musically ‘About You’ was a continuation of ‘Robbers’. I suppose stylistically it was a little bit cleaner, and then we had this idea of why don’t we go full Phil Spector, so rather than being able to feel the rhythm it’s just this huge hall reverb, like ‘Be My Body’. That was the version Warren Ellis got hold of. So all of the distortion – the moving, weird distortion – that’s actually Warren’s strings. That’s what gives the simplicity of the song – even though it’s in major key – this gothic feeling."