The ever hard-to-classify rockers in The 1975 know how to keep audiences guessing. Today, the group have brought along a fascinating but tragic music video for their single “Somebody Else” off I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It. The three-minute black-and-white intro brings us inside a vintage apartment, where a figure, presumably frontman Matt Healy, sits on a couch, unmoving, with hair covering his face. As another version of himself, clad in clown makeup, enters the apartment, we hear canned audience laughter, cheering and booing as he despondently goes about mundane tasks, like washing the makeup off his face and changing into skateboarding clothes that he has stashed away in an old suitcase by the entrance. It feels voyeuristic and creepy, to say the least.
When the dreamy, introspective breakup song begins, director Tim Mattia has switched cinematic gears, and it feels like 2016 again as Healy embarks on his skateboard, winding his way through town and making stops along the way to have a few emotional breakdowns in a variety of stereotypically desolate locations: a late-night diner, a seedy strip club, the back of a car in a parking garage (where he has a desperate hookup with a stripper who also turns out to be his doppelganger), and on the ground while covered in blood after a physical altercation. Throughout the clip, Healy reaches out to his literal reflections in mirrors and windows, making the rest of us hope that we never have to experience a breakup again, at least if it’s going to be this bad.
