You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
This episode contains explicit language.
The 1975 are a band from Manchester, England,
made up of Matty Healy, Adam Han, Ross MacDonald, and George Daniel.
They started playing music together in 2002, when they were teenagers.
Since then, they've released four albums, won three Brit Awards, and gotten two Grammy nominations.
Their most recent album, Notes on a Conditional Form, came out in May 2020.
In this episode, Maddie and George break down how they made the song, The Birthday Party.
My name's Matthew Healy.
My name's George Daniel.
I guess I'm the primary producer and he is the primary songwriter.
We've been together since we were children, so we just try and support each other.
The song started in LA.
I spent a lot of my 20s in LA.
Normally, either I'll start something on my laptop.
or Matty will come to me with an idea and want to record it.
But this, actually for the birthday party, we were all playing in a room together.
That was the first time in years that we'd sat down to work out the arrangement of a song,