JK JUST THE ONES WITH VIDEOS

[Video][Website]
[6.47]

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: I Like It When You Sing, For You Are So Wistful Yet So Sickeningly Aware of It. 
[8]

Hannah Jocelyn: And this is where they hit it out of the park. Yes, I just cited myself, but so does Matt Healy here, several times over. Everyone involved is at the peak of their powers, with the exception of the “breasts” and “you smell a bit” lines. But the rest of this is so perfect in its simplicity, even as The 1975 is so often associated with excess. There’s nothing remotely out of place here — it just all sounds meant to be together, as even the “you smell a bit” line gets a rhyme with “you were fit but you’re losing it” later in the song. This is as close to perfect as the group is going to get. It’s so mesmerizing that it’s difficult to even type this while listening to the song, as it’s too easy to just be immersed in the lyrical scene-setting, the instrumentation, and yes, those references to earlier songs. Wherever they go from here, I’m definitely going to follow. 
[9]

Ryo Miyauchi: The self-references here are Easter eggs buried like a three-year-old blog post deep down a Tumblr feed. They’re mementos of who Matty Healy was: a young, wide-eyed soul, hungry for love and thrills. And “A Change of Heart” aches because they’re now a deserted shrine to what he used to believe in. The most painful of them all is a response to his lyrics from “Robbers”: “You used to have a face straight out of a magazine; now you just look like anyone.” Appearances don’t change, just his perceptions of them.
[10]

Alfred Soto: An asshole’s lament, dependent on one’s tolerance for the synths and Matt Healy’s “self-aware” Kerouac reference (ah, “self-awareness” — the bane of my existence in a year when accepting Kanye got confused with making excuses for him). To get infuriated by “A Change of Heart” means paying attention to the words, and the healy-mouthed vocal doesn’t or won’t help. Besides, why bother? Its host album has prettier electronic jams.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: Madonna’s “Crazy For You” as performed by a band with chronic anhedonia, atop of which is the basic throughline of “This Summer’s Gonna Hurt Like a Motherfucker.” The polite arrangement feigns the sensitivity that the lyric lacks: yet another dude’s contempt for his supposedly shallower ex (whom he dated anyway), what with her Instagrammed salads and her unseemly cigarette technique and her breasts. “Change of heart” nothing; what we have here is a change of dick. And like all such penile fluctuations, it’s nowhere near as meaningful as he thinks.
[3]

Anthony Easton: The mumble is frustrating because they think they are clever. They have that kind of above-it-all, laconic sprechsang that kind of works if the music commits (see Amanda Lear), but nothing here commits, and becomes a drone-y, grey muddle of emo theatrics — if we considered standing still a kind of theatrics. (Rae Sremmurd did an entire movement of the theatrics of sitting still, and the first three seconds of “Black Beatles” could teach The 1975 how to hit similar targets with much better skill) 
[2]

Thomas Inskeep: This makes my heart cold and dead. I liked “The Sound” quite a bit earlier this year, but this sounds like Maroon 5 for the Hot Topic crowd, twee and limp and just about everything I dislike about hit music now.
[0]

Juana Giaimo: Maybe my problem with The 1975 is that I can’t believe Matt Healy’s self-pity. This time he sings that he has a change of heart as if he was observing it rather than not living it. His other observations about a relationship that has lost all excitement may be clever, but unlike “Somebody Else,” his absent-mood in “A Change of Heart” isn’t convincing enough to make this song fully cynical — maybe because the melody is too mellow, especially because of those choir-like “oh-oh”s.
[5]

Will Adams: A less effective cut from I Like It When You Sleep…, “A Change of Heart” meanders around its powdered-sugar production without much variation, save for a few, brief moments of poignant pause.
[6]

Claire Biddles: Everything ends up blank in the end. All hopes become neutralised, not so much going sour as being wiped clean, the jutting bones exposed under stretched skin. “You used to have a face straight out of a magazine/but now you just look like anyone.” All the hope and possibility that you tied up in one person isn’t there anymore. You made them into a fictional character, you used them for your dress-up Bonnie and Clyde fantasy, but they’re just a real person after all, and so are you. “A Change of Heart” is the pathetic realisation that you’re both disappointments. It’s the act of scrolling through your Instagram in bed, newly dull and emotionless, deleting all the evidence with cried-off scraps of last night’s make-up crusted into your cheeks. But it’s also the knowledge that you’ll do it again, the inevitability of an broken promise, like kidding yourself you’ll never drink again when you’re hungover. Cynicism might temporarily cancel out romanticism, but true romantics like Matty Healy, like everyone who clings to this song, like me — we all know this cycle repeats itself forever, and we’re always going to be willing participants.
[10]

Megan Harrington: There’s a croon Matty Healy affects for “A Change of Heart,” and like everything about this song, it works on two levels. It’s a soft seduction, his vocal high in the mix, intimate in your ears. He’s tugging at your wrist, but never begging or pleading, never rising above the level of suggestion that you’ll like him, that you’ll believe him. And it’s a disguise. If you don’t like him, if you don’t believe him, the truth is that it wasn’t even him, he’s not that crooner. On most occasions he performs the song with a cigarette dangling from his fingertips, a glass of wine in his other hand, and his hip pressed to the side of bandmate Ross MacDonald’s keyboard. Adding a full philharmonic orchestra, as the band did for BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge concert series, proves the song is fundamentally consistent with Disney’s soundtrack masterpieces. The context juxtaposes Healy’s preternaturally oozy lounge lizard with his own childlike desire to be loved unconditionally. Scaling the song up offers adults their own “Beauty and the Beast,” but the band are also capable of performing “A Change of Heart” in a very small way — just Healy strumming a single note on his guitar and guitarist Adam Hann punching keyboard presets — which demonstrates the framework, the architecture. As beautiful as the song’s pastel synths are, and as gentle as they sound in comparison to the numb, grey theremin that wafts in like chloroform on a dirty rag, the feat here is ultimately one of concept. It’s a fitting together of little pieces: self-loathing and carbonation, comfort and goodbye. “A Change of Heart” documents Healy’s worst side but it also holds forth the promise of redemption, not through the titular change of heart but through self-acceptance, allowing the proliferation of masks to be as real as the hidden face.
[10]

Edward Okulicz: The narrator’s unreliable most of the time, but I believe it when it switches to what the woman says. Therefore, I conclude that despite Matt Healy claiming he had the change of heart, it’s actually she who’s had it and he’s pathetically trying to convince himself of the opposite. This vapid girl who posts pictures of her food on the Internet, she dumped him, how could this be? There’s what I think is a theremin doing an impression of a Stylophone, and it is midnight longing and self-loathing. Unlike on “Somebody Else,” the pathos on this one hits its target cleanly.
[9]

Jonathan Bradley: Perhaps what makes Matt Healy the ideal avatar of twenty-something indolence is the way, for all his charm and intelligence and careful, witty turns of phrase, it rarely leads him to anything satisfying or substantial. He condescends to women posting their salads on the ‘gram, but he’s the one quoting Kerouac and his own songs, and playing it off like it’s not dopey because he’s self-aware. (Lest it go to his head, we won’t mention that this song is an embarrassment of delicious couplets; “You were coming across as clever/Then you lit the wrong end of your cigarette” is a nastily observed moment of failed social grace in a song stuffed with them.) The girl gets the best put-down of the song anyway: “I’ve been so worried about you lately,” she avers. “You look shit and you smell a bit.” The song’s muted merry-go-round riff twirls round once more. A change of heart? Matty, I don’t think it was your heart that counted here.
[8]

Brad Shoup: Even before she quoted Matty back to Matty, the contours of “Sex” were buried in those first few lines. For those inclined, “A Change of Heart” nests references to other cuts from the self-titled. Those who aren’t may wonder why he’s spending so much time creaming over magazines. It’s sophistipop for churls: jagged insults ground up and poured over someone’s head. The sliding one-note solo on some kind of treated guitar is a callous shrug: what a lil stinker I am.
[5]

Katie Gill: Imagine that a modern synthpop band was asked to write the break-up montage song for a movie set in the 1980s, but they couldn’t use any actual 1980s songs and had to write something new. That’s this song. Points also given for the correct assumption that a lot of people who quote Kerouac are actual jerks.
[7]

Ramzi Awn: The aching way the single word “city” is sung is enough to express the possibility of pop in one moment. The track reads like a Dear John letter with more balls, and recalls a certain time with swagger.  
[7]

Iain Mew: I don’t know if it’s the “Only You” effect, if it’s coming from a part of the world whose enduring seasonal favourite involves a couple exchanging insults, or just listening to it while wrapping presents, but somehow right now this sounds like a fitting Christmas song for a shitty year.
[6]