Give Yourself a Try

The guitar here arrives like a challenge — wiry, angular, borrowed straight from the post-punk vocabulary of the early 1980s without apology. The Smiths and New Order are present as ghosts in the production, but the song uses their bones to talk about something distinctly contemporary: the particular exhaustion of being young in a world that offers more information than wisdom. Healy's vocal delivery on this track is more performative than confessional, leaning into a sardonic half-shout that suits the nervous energy of the instrumentation. The rhythm section pushes everything forward with an urgency that almost masks how weary the lyrics actually are — they describe the strange disorientation of early adulthood, the gap between what you were told life would feel like and what it actually does. There's a generosity in the title, an instruction to extend toward yourself the same patience you might give someone else, though the song doesn't moralize about it. It belongs to the period when The 1975 were becoming something more ambitious than a guitar band, reaching for cultural diagnosis as much as emotional expression. This is a song for the commute back from somewhere that didn't go well, when the city feels alienating and you need something with enough momentum to carry you forward.