I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)

Album: A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships (2018)
Charted: 67
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Songfacts®:

  • This '90s-style rock track is a moving song in which Matty Healy reflects on passing away. The 1975 frontman talks about how people pretend that death only happens to "your family and friends" and not to yourself. However, when life gets to be drudgery, escaping it by dying sometimes has its attractions.
  • The song was birthed in the autumn of 2017 when Healy was feeling low and he came up with the opening riff on his acoustic guitar. He recalled the moment of inspiration to Genius:

    "We have this thing of when it feels really good, it feels unearthed, You know you found something like a relic. That was the main inspiration. Cause that guitar riff felt so like a thing, the opening guitar riff. I thought I had like nicked it and then my flatmate thought I'd nicked it and I hadn't."
  • Healy had the idea for the song's cinematic Britpop production after he got Beck's composer father, David Campbell, to add strings. He recalled thinking to Pitchfork:

    "I have the potential for this to be cinematic. Why not do a gritty, English 'I Don't Want To Miss A Thing'?"

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