Is it wrong to say that a song about climate change gave me chills? Either way, The 1975 dropped a new song this week—the first off the band's upcoming album, Notes on a Conditional Form—and it's pretty stunning.
Instead of a typical song, the track called 'The 1975' (the title given to all their album-opening songs) features a speech from teen climate activist Greta Thunberg. Thunberg is a 16-year-old Swedish student known for her work fighting global warming and raising awareness around climate change. In 2018, she continuously skipped school to sit in front of the Swedish Parliament to protest the government's lack of action around the climate crisis. (She's since been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.)
According to Pitchfork, much of the audio in the song comes from Thunberg's speech at the World Economic Forum. The track opens with Thunberg saying:
'We are right now in the beginning of a climate and ecological crisis. And we need to call it what it is: an emergency. We must acknowledge that we do not have the situation under control and that we don't have all the solutions yet, unless those solutions mean that we simply stop doing certain things. We must admit that we are losing this battle. We have to acknowledge that the older generations have failed. All political movements in their present form have failed. But homo sapiens have not yet failed. Yes, we are failing. But there still is time to turn this thing around. We can still fix this.'
It's also a pretty appropriate song to release during this record-breakingly hot summer, with some countries have experiencing temperatures of 105.
If you'd like to listen yourself, here's the song in full:
And here's Thunberg speaking at the World Economic Forum:
Madison is the digital deputy editor at ELLE, where she also covers news, politics, and culture. If she’s not online, she’s probably napping or trying not to fall while rock climbing.
