“Somebody Else” by 1975

"Somebody Else" was the last song the 1975 wrote for their 2016 second album, I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It, and it went out as the record's fourth single on Dirty Hit and Polydor. Matty Healy worked out the words in the back of a cab in Los Angeles, and they pick at the scab of a breakup: the jealousy, guilt and bitterness of finding out an ex has moved on to someone new.

All four wrote it, with Healy and George Daniel producing alongside Mike Crossey, and it's a slow jam with the lights turned low: sparse retro synths, 808 percussion and a pulse borrowed from house and techno, with Adam Hann's guitar and Ross MacDonald's bass sliding underneath. Critics picked it as the album's best song, it landed on year-end and decade-end lists at NME and Pitchfork, and Lorde later named it a big influence on Melodrama.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.