Everybody’s favourite world-touring pop band and a 16-year-old girl with her sights set on stopping the effects of climate change might be an odd match to some, but alas! The 1975 and Greta Thunberg have come together to send a shared message to the world on the first track of the BRIT Award-winner’s forthcoming record, Noted on a Conditional Form. The song marks the first time the band have ever collaborated with another artist, and the first time Greta has put her voice to music.
Every record from The 1975 to date has opened with an ambient track named after the group themselves. But they switched “The 1975” up this time around, inviting Greta into the studio to record a four minute monologue in which she calls for “civil disobedience” to combat the practises that are destroying our universe. “We are, right now, in the beginning of a climate and ecological crisis,” Thunberg states, “and we need to call it what it is: an emergency.” Matty Healy used Twitter to call Greta “an inspiration” after the track dropped last night.
You might be quick to call out the hypocrisy of a jet-setting band using their new record as a platform to preach saving the world, but it’s important to remember the widespread influence of their music. Their last three records have landed at number one in the UK album charts; their last two entered the top five in the US. It’s safe to say people are listening.
Similarly, the band have pushed their parent label Dirty Hit to clean up their act too. The music industry is a huge polluter, creating dangerous levels of single use plastics, but the label is phasing out jewel cases and is focussing on minimising the effects of vinyl production too (“We’re minimising it by only doing lightweight vinyl from now on,” the band’s manager Jamie Oborne told The Guardian. They’re also getting rid of plastic shrink wrap and swapping to paper alternatives instead.
All of the proceeds that The 1975 make from the track will go to Extinction Rebellion, and they also announced that the album it will feature on — a follow-up to their now Mercury Prize-nominated third record A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships — will be released on 21 February 2020. If, you know, the planet is still spinning by then.
You can listen to the full track below: