| About You | |
| Type: | single |
| Artist: | the 1975 |
| Album: | Being Funny in a Foreign Language |
| Released: | 8 December 2022 |
| Genre: | |
| Length: | 5:26 |
| Label: | |
| Producer: |
|
| Prev Title: | All I Need to Hear |
| Prev Year: | 2022 |
| Year: | 2022 |
| Next Title: | Oh Caroline |
| Next Year: | 2023 |
"About You" is a song by English band the 1975 from their fifth studio album, Being Funny in a Foreign Language (2022). The song was released on 8 December 2022 through Dirty Hit and Polydor Records as the fifth single from the album. It was written by band members Matty Healy and George Daniel, who also produced the song alongside Jack Antonoff.[3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] The song features additional vocals by Carly Holt, who is married to the 1975's lead guitarist Adam Hann, and string arrangements from musician and composer Warren Ellis of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.[9] Musically, "About You" is a pop rock ballad featuring shoegaze-inspired production; Healy cited U2, Phil Spector and David Cronenberg as influences for the track.
Healy envisioned "About You" as a musical continuation of the band's 2013 hit single "Robbers".[10] He credited musician and composer Warren Ellis - who contributed string arrangements to the album - with having a significant influence on the track's creative direction. He noted that the initial version of the track was "really simple" and "stylistically a little bit cleaner" than "Robbers", before Ellis "made it all weird and shoegazey". Healy felt Ellis' work on the track was characterized by the "moving, weird distortion" present throughout the arrangement, which he felt lent the song a "gothic feeling". He elaborated: "Even though it’s major key, [Ellis] gave it this terror, which makes my performance in it a lot less romantic because everything is mushing together, and it’s violent." He elaborated: "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."[11]
Healy cited Phil Spector as an influence on the band's initial decision to fill the track with "this huge hall reverb (...) rather than being able to feel the rhythm", drawing inspiration from Spector's production on The Ronettes' "Be My Baby".[12] He also noted the song's similarities with U2's "With or Without You", and likened the final version of the song to the track "Inside Your Mind" from the band's third album, A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships (2018).[13]
Musically, "About You" is a pop rock song in the key of D major, and has a tempo of 96 beats per minute. The song's shoegaze-inspired production is characterized by "swooping strings, fuzzed-out guitars, and drowsy saxophones", which Maura Johnston of Rolling Stone felt "[shroud]" Healy's voice in the "chaos" of the instrumentation.[14] Healy sings in a lower register throughout the track, which Johnston likened to the voice of George Michael.[14]
| Peak position | |
| Ireland (IRMA)[15] | 41 |
|---|---|
| New Zealand Hot Singles (RMNZ)[16] | 8 |