The 1975's frontman Matty Healy has claimed the band's collaboration with Greta Thunberg for their new album came after she was rejected by "bigger artists".

A spoken-word recording of the climate activist is the opening track on the band's fourth album, Notes on a Conditional Form, due to be released later this month.

In an interview with the Sunday Times this weekend, Healy, 31, said that Thunberg had gone to "bigger artists" than his band to work with but had been turned away.

Healy said: “I feel like big statements will be made by pop stars, but they’ll do it when the cultural narrative has massaged a subject enough for it to be not really a statement any more. A narrative needs to be seen as progressive but also safe. I call it ‘workshop woke’.”

The singer described Thunberg, 17, as "the most punk person I have ever met", adding that he wanted to include her on the album so her voice was "documented in a formal place in pop culture".

The five-minute track features Thunberg speaking over instrumental music about the climate crisis. “And we need to call it what it is: an emergency," she reads. Like the band's previous albums, the opening track is simply called The 1975.

The track was originally released last July and money raised from it went to environmental movement, Extinction Rebellion.

Healy said there was backlash to the track, notably from David Davies, the Conservative MP for Monmouth in South Wales, who accused the band of hypocrisy for going on world tours while advocating to tackle climate change.

In an open letter, Davies wrote: "“Given your concern about a ‘climate emergency’, I just wondered how you are going to get to these places? Are you travelling to Asia on the Trans-Siberian Express? Or will you be sailing in a £4m super-yacht like your mate Greta [Thunberg]?"

Healy addressed the criticism. “I always knew I was going to be called a hypocrite or a champagne socialist, but the idea that no one should say anything or try to help if they haven’t 100% figured out how to be carbon neutral, along with the rest of the world, is a really illogical way of thinking about the problem,” he told the Sunday Times.

The 1975 have taken steps to make their tours more eco-friendly, according to music-news.com, introducing hybrid-powered generators with solar arrays and sustainably-sourced Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil (HVO) fuel to power shows along with supporting reforestation charities through ticket sales.

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