Following the release of their sophomore album, I Like It When You Sleep For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It which dropped in late February, The 1975 have released a handful of videos honoring certain titles off of the record such as Love Me, UGH!, The Sound, A Change of Heart, and most recently Somebody Else.
The video starts off in a sitcom-esque setting in strictly black and white where we see singer Matty Healy sitting on the couch while another version of himself from the previous “A Change Of Heart” video walks in. When he takes off his shirt the crowd cheers and then they loudly boo him as he takes off his clown shoes and makeup, sitting down next to his motionless counterpart where robotic, digitized, unintelligible words are said to the version of Healy on the couch.
From there, you’re broken out of the black and white era and taken to a multitude of locations – bars, cars, eerily empty streets, diners, underpasses, and garages. Each location has a specific melancholy mood and purpose to the story of the tenth track and how it unfolds.
“Somebody Else” comes off as a soul shattering love song but after the video people are theorizing it’s a bit more than that, especially once you see faces in the crowd like the girl who saunters away with Healy and a group of men who give him quite the bloody nose turn into the singer himself.
The opening scene makes the back of your mind buzz and wander to the polarizing, pressuring and often scary parts of the media and their obsession with artists that can come with very unhealthy elements. You start to think the song is more about falling apart with yourself rather than someone else, that it’s about self-preservation and discovery and the most internal struggle with yourself over who you are instead of the end of a relationship you never wanted to end where you go to metaphorical war over records and furniture and things alike.
Others believe that it could portray how much people focus on themselves in relationships and life overall. Granted, it’s a The 1975 video so there are bound to be hundreds of theories and questions left unanswered and an atmosphere arises where everyone can interpret the song and visual differently. Maybe the opening is just an homage to David Lynch’s “Rabbits” and only that, we may never know.
The music video is as cinematic as ever, capturing the disheartening atmosphere that makes your soul ache and your chest feel suffocated ever so perfectly. It provokes feelings out of you that you didn’t expect to feel from this body of work. It makes the gears in your mind turn and creak, you want to watch it a thousand times to analyze it and the underlying meanings and references to other creations by The 1975 hidden in the video (which you can view some of here) only increases interest. The boys from Wilmslow seem to have done it again, creating a beautiful video telling a complex story that makes you never want to take your eyes off of the screen.
Kryptonite Music Magazine 