If You're Too Shy (Let Me Know)

Eight minutes long, and the funk is unrepentant. "If You're Too Shy (Let Me Know)" is The 1975's most shameless love letter to 1985 — gated snare, a bassline that struts, sheets of synth pad, and a saxophone solo (played by Healy's father-figure collaborator John Waugh) so gloriously unironic it dares you to laugh. FKA twigs floats through the background vocals like a signal from another room. The song is about a webcam relationship: watching someone perform intimacy through a screen, being aroused, being ashamed, being unable to stop — "I see her online all the time, I'm having a hard time." Healy sings it in his fullest voice, straining upward on the chorus, no irony filter available. It's the emotional center of *Notes On A Conditional Form*, a sprawling and often frustrating record that this track single-handedly rescued when it arrived in April 2020, a month into global lockdown, when the entire population had suddenly become people who only met each other through screens. That accident of timing turned a song about loneliness and mediated desire into a communal one. Best played loud in a small room, dancing badly, alone.