10 Best The 1975 Songs Ranked
7. By My Mistake
An acoustic, downtempo ballad from A Brief Enquiry Into Online Relationships, Healy is at his best here, mixing genuinely beautiful melody and overall vocal performance with poignant lyrics, and contrasting them with genuinely funny, irreverent jokes - "The smell of your hair reminds me of her feet" and "I shouldn’t have called/ Cause we shouldn’t speak/ You do make me hard/ But she makes me weak".
The frontman perfects being both deadly serious and tongue-in-cheek at the same time on this track, and it’s brilliant.
What holds this song together is the genuine beauty of its bridge and chorus; mixing melancholy, melody, and self-deprecation to concoct an oddly profound passage in a song with such otherwise irreverent lyrics.
In many ways, this is what The 1975 and Matty Healy’s songwriting is all about. It is also a song that your friends who don’t ‘get’ the group will use as justification for them being overrated, ridiculous, faux-profound pseudo-intellectual tripe.
If one thing is for certain, it is that The 1975, despite the accessibility of their sound and the general appeal of their aesthetics, are not for everyone.
Standout lyric:
So save all the jokes/ You’re gonna make/ While I see how much drink I can take/ And be my mistake