'Fans look to the boys to be pioneers': Jamie Oborne talks The 1975's fourth album

Jamie Oborne has been looking ahead to The 1975’s upcoming fourth album, telling Music Week that a “natural first statement” will emerge soon, with new music coming before Reading & Leeds Festivals.

The Dirty Hit and All On Red Management boss appears in the new edition of Music Week, out now, and tees up the band’s next record in a wide-ranging interview.

“The record is coming together. We’ve had this recording studio tour bus on the American tour which has been great for productivity,” explained Oborne. “The boys have been constantly working. I can’t say exactly when it will come, there are a few elements coming together, but we will be releasing music before Reading.”

Oborne said the band, who recently scooped two Ivor Novello awards to add to their haul from the BRITs, will be working in the Oxford studio in which they made parts of the chart-topping A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships.

A Brief Inquiry… has sold 131,303 copies to date, while Dirty Hit picked up the independent label of the year trophy at the Music Week Awards in May.

“It feels like it will be a long record. Will it be a double album? I don’t know what that means any more, it’s definitely going to a long album but I can’t possibly commit to whether it will be a double album or not. That’s a decision that happens when everything is almost completed,” he said.

“It’s? an extraordinary record. I was listening to the demos and it’s amazing.”

Oborne said plans around the specifics of the release are still to be tied up.

We’ve had a lot of back and forth about whether we drop the whole thing as a project Jamie Oborne

“We’ve had a lot of back and forth about whether we drop the whole thing as a project,” he said. “As always with The 1975, we have a pool of possibilities and then Matthew Healy pulls the rug from under our feet at the last minute! The natural first statement always emerges. We’re just figuring out what direction to take it at the moment.”

Oborne said the target for Notes On A Conditional Form will continue to revolve around “identity pieces”.

“It’s about achieving a critical mass of exposure through releasing music, videos or photographs, which is basically doing the same again, but at a greater scale because we’re naturally achieving a greater scale,” he said.

The manager and label boss also suggested that he’s taken note of other acts adopting similar strategies to The 1975’s ambitious double album campaign.

“I’ve certainly seen a few other people doing the same thing, but what’s important to remember is, it wasn’t a commercial decision,” he said. “It was based on the fact that Matthew and I didn’t feel that we could tour in the correct way, satisfy the amount of places we had to go to and keep everything feeling vibrant without having another record.”

He said the band’s fans “look to the boys to be pioneers” and reiterated his description of the group as “the greatest band of this generation”.

Oborne believes that The 1975 remain an exciting prospect because “they mean something in this age”.

“I don’t want to hear music that doesn’t mean anything,” he said.

Subscribers can read the full interview online here.

Read our cover interview with Matthew Healy and Jamie Oborne here.

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Photo: Matt Salacuse