15 ............................................................................The 1975: Deep Dive

The 1975 H a v e Nowhere to Grow But Up

The British pop-rock phenoms have spent much of the decade growing in size and stature — and as they work on their fourth album, can they become the biggest band in the world?

London is melting. It’s July 25, 2019, and the entirety of England is currently in the throes of the hottest day in the country’s history, the final high for the day topping off at 38.7 degrees Celsius (that’s 101.6 Fahrenheit for the North American readers). By the end of the day, a similar heatwave smashes high-temp records in France, the Netherlands, and Germany — incontrovertible proof of climate change’s perpetually worsening effects, and an unfortunate stroke of perfect timing for the release of The 1975’s new single. The night before, the British pop-rock phenoms released “The 1975,” the opening track and first single from their forthcoming fourth album, Notes on a Conditional Form. Since their self-titled 2013 debut, every 1975 full-length has opened with an intro track named as such, featuring a variation on a hushed, soothing musical motif. This time, the theme is nowhere to be found, replaced by a nearly five-minute monologue from 16-year-old climate change activist Greta Thunberg over subtle strings and tinkling piano. “We are right now in the beginning of a climate and ecological crisis,” she states plainly but purposefully, ending on a literal rallying cry: “It is now time for civil disobedience. It is time to rebel.”

“My mom texted me to say the new song isn’t a bop,” drummer George Daniel laughs. We’re amidst a cavernous soundstage tucked within Black Island Studios in North Acton, where Daniel, frontman Matty Healy, bassist Ross MacDonald, and guitarist Adam Hann are hard at work shooting the video for Notes’ second single, “People” — a searing, aggressive blast of capital-R rock music, as Healy screams about legal weed and a generation that “wanna fuck Barack Obama” before landing on a decidedly radio-unfriendly chorus: “Stop fucking with the kids.”

While enjoying a morning spliff, he enthusiastically explains his vision for The 1975’s own headlining slot at this year’s fest, which will kick off with “People” while mirroring the video’s intense imagery. Mid-thought, he’s cut off by a bicycle-bound fan who’s stopped outside the studio to politely offer his admiration. “Welcome to Acton!,” the cyclist offers before pedaling away, as Healy’s initial graciousness takes a darkly humorous turn.

“One of these days, a fan’s gonna walk up to me and go, ‘Are you Matt Healy?’ And then go, ‘Alright then!,’” he exclaims, miming a stabbing motion towards an invisible torso and eliciting laughter from Daniel.

There’s a good reason why defying death is on Healy’s mind. The “People” video is nothing if not ambitious, as the band thrashes in an eyeball-burning box constructed of video screens not unlike the glass-cage performance captured in “The Sound,” an anthemic single from The 1975’s 2016 sophomore bow I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it. The screens display oft-gruesome imagery practically mainlined from the internet’s darkest, trolliest recesses, and the day-long shoot includes a fast-paced robotic camera that has the capacity to literally kill someone if they get too close to it — not to mention a harnessed, upside-down Healy, swinging to and fro as the crew frantically tries to capture the perfect shot while the blood rushes to his brain.

Keeping the peace between each other has never been much of a struggle for The 1975 — an astounding feat, considering the quartet have been at it since 2002, when they formed while attending school in the Northwest England county of Cheshire. If their core emotional dynamic has stayed resolute, then The 1975 have done the opposite artistically, essentially engaging in musi-

cal dress-up while following wherever their interests take them. Thus far, they’ve proven effective in modes ranging from effervescent pop-rock, tender balladry, and bouncing Afrobeats-inspired motifs, to spiky emo, passionately shouted anthems, and electronic pop fantasias.

Ambition has abounded: the gargantuan, 70-minute-plus I like it when you sleep featured multiple songs running well over the five-minute mark, while the shorter A Brief Inquiry included a robot-recited monologue about living online. Both possess the stylistic range of one of Healy’s here-today-gone-tomorrow Spotify playlists, more often than not sounding a million light years away from the pulsing, sleek emo of their 2013 debut — itself receiving what Healy views as a less-than-welcoming critical reception upon its release. “The critics hated it so much,” he recalls, “but I felt validated by how much the countercultural kids loved it.”

Healy and co. traffic in youth-culture music that often radiates the generational sincerity of its listeners; “Love It If We Made It,” a titanic slab of pop-rock catharsis from A Brief Inquiry that features Healy shout-singing like an open firehose while namechecking Lil Peep and quoting Donald Trump tweets, is the type of all-or-nothing gesture that Debuting in the top 5 of the Billboard 200, the album as a whole didn’t perform quite as well as its predecessor, which kicked off its chart run at the top; but A Brief Inquiry reflected a different summit for The 1975, who went from a well-kept critical secret to the center of conversation. Not since Vampire Weekend — another group of impeccably styled and sonically fluid young white men blurring the lines between rock music and everything else — has a band halted the pick-a-side critical discourse so thoroughly in its tracks, with little room in between its two opposing poles.

As a lyricist, Healy casts shapes that are fatalistic, romantic, and tissue-thin in their sensitivity — bear witness to A Brief Inquiry’s penultimate, George Michael-recalling weeper “I Couldn’t Be More In Love,” in which he soars through multiple key changes while pleading, “What about these feelings I got?” It’s easy to hear why they attract a passionately young audience, springing forth from the first generation that’s often forced to learn how to process their feelings in a very public way. “They sound like social media — like someone scrolling,” chuckles the band’s manager Jamie Oborne as he discusses their generational appeal.

There’s a self-aware promotional side to The 1975’s whole thing, too — a self-aware embrace of “eras” not unlike what’s typically expected from more straight ahead “pop” artists like Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber (two artists who Healy’s cited in the past as peers and influences). Notes is considered part-and-parcel with its predecessor, both forming a sort-of double-album representative of the band’s “Music for Cars” era — a designator that references the title of early pre-debut EPs, as well as the original working title for A Brief Inquiry. The 1975 will try anything at least once — as much a reflection of the streaming generation’s genre-less consumption as it is a willingness to build a career out of perpetual forward motion. This whiplash-inducing tendency to pile left-turn upon left-turn is at the heart of Notes’ one-two punch of “The 1975” and “People” — a literal call-to-arms followed by a furious admission of societal defeat — as well as the decision to throw Thunberg in the mix for “The

And she won’t be the last: Healy intends to log studio time with indie-centric artists like Phoebe Bridgers, as well as Dirty Hit-signed artists beabadoobee and The Japanese House, when the band returns to the studio later in the year to finish Notes. The ostensibly 22-song album is very much still in the early stages of creation, with four songs total in completion or close to it; besides “The 1975” and “People,” there’s the dusky, acoustic “The Birthday Party,” and “Frail State of Mind,” a 2step-driven slice of pop recalling UK producer Burial with Healy’s gorgeous, cloudy sigh weaving in and out of the beat.

The album is currently penciled in for a February release, despite Healy’s cl aim that it’d be out this past May. “It’s the price that I pay for having real-time expression and an ongoing dialogue with fans,” he says regarding the perceived blown deadline due to his previous statements. “Sometimes I forget that I’m talking to a lot more people than I think.” Mainly, The 1975 have simply been too busy to finish the record; my time with the band is bookended by a gig at Lollapalooza Paris and a brief spate of dates in Russia and Ukraine. After that, more touring in Eastern Europe and Asia, studio time to finish Notes — and, then, more touring, this time in the U.S.

”Sometimes I forget that I'm talking to a lot more people than I think.”

“I feel like I’ve been on the same tour since 2013,” Healy states with equal awe and exhaustion. “I stopped to make two records, but this band hasn’t left each others’ side for six years straight. You can’t help but become so immersed.” Immersion sometimes comes at a price: Healy has a professed aversion to “socializing, or new people,” and many of the people in his proximity over the past decade have been collaborators or professional colleagues. For the last three and a half years, Healy’s also been in a relationship with actress and model Gabriella Brooks, and when I ask him about the topic of relationships in general, he demurs — briefly.

can nest

“I don’t really want to talk about it, to be honest with you,” he states several times, before admitting that he’s “going through it at the moment...What’s very difficult is being able to nurture things — even if it’s a home space. You take pride in your little that you’ve made, but it’s difficult to nurture all of your relationships. When you’re with your wife and you’re not talking to each other, on your phones — those moments don’t not count. When you lose that proximity with people, it becomes really difficult to maintain relationships.”

If Healy’s struggled to keep tabs on some of his closer relationships, then Daniel has rarely bee beyond an arm’s reach. The drummer first entered Healy’s line of sight while the latter was having a go at one of his early band attempts with Hann and MacDonald. Originally, Healy was playing drums and singing, but he eventually tired of double-duty: “He was like, who’s that weird kid that plays drums?,” Daniel remembers with a chuckle.

He describes his first impression of Healy as “the most outwardly passionate person in school — endearing, and intimidating.” Before the quartet were The 1975, they cycled through myriad band names, including

"They were rejected by every major label,” Oborne remembers. “That’s when we decided to do it ourselves.”

The Slowdown and Drive Like I Do; they played their earliest shows under the moniker Me and You Versus Them, bashing it out in a Wilmslow town hall that a local council worker had booked for shows. “It was fucking gnarly — our little version of a hardcore scene,” Healy recalls. “Just a lot of drinking and playing music really badly.” As the band went through various embryonic stages, Oborne received a MySpace message containing a YouTube link of the foursome at a gig. “It took me a couple of weeks to pin down Matthew,” he remembers. (“It was easier to contact the dead than it was to contact the 17-year-old me,” Healy concurs.) “I knew they had great songwriting,” Oborne continues. “When I met Matthew, I felt his presence. I was magnetized to him.” After a few years of continuing to hone their sound, The 1975 signed to Oborne’s Dirty Hit label, which was founded near the end of 2009, as one of the imprint’s first acts. “They were rejected by every major label,” Oborne remembers. “That’s when we decided to do it ourselves.” “People would pass on us because we dressed weird,” Healy opines regarding the rejection they faced in the band’s early years. “The Killers had just happened, The Libertines had just happened. Everyone was looking for the next Arctic Monkeys.” Over the course of 12 months starting in mid-2012, The 1975 released four EPs — Facedown, Sex, Music for Cars, and IV — leading up to their debut that fascinatingly showed the still-fledging emo-rockers exploring their own eclectic tendencies in real time, with R&B-tinged cuts and forays into electronic music that foreshadowed the anything-goes creative approach the band’s become known for today. “It didn’t make sense to a lot of people,” Healy recalls regarding these early releases, claiming that A Brief Inquiry’s eclecticism effectively reflected a return to the creative attitude embodied in those EPs. “I just kept thinking, ‘I’m me, I’m who I’m talking to, and I know people like me.’ I knew that [embodying] no genre was representative of something modern.”

To this day, Healy and Daniel primarily work together on all aspects of songwriting; either Matty comes to George with something written on the guitar or keyboard, or George comes to Matty with something he composed on his computer. “Matty’s a better musician than me, but I know how to use the computer,” Daniel laughs. “Sometimes I’ll come to him with something and say, ‘Can you write a song around this?’ There always has to be a mutual understanding about what we’re trying to achieve.”

Of course, nothing lasts forever. Part of what makes The 1975’s music built to last is a sense of timelessness imbued even in an ultra-topical song like “Love It If We Made It” — power translated from pure passion — but it’s hard not to wonder how a band that burns this brightly keeps its creative and functional flame from being extinguished. The question isn’t just on Healy’s mind, too: it’s what continues to push him forward. “I just want to keep making records, and I’m excited because I don’t know when I’m going to have this insanely creative period again,” he exclaims, his energy slowly and finally fading from a long day of busyness and an accompanying migraine. “I’ve spent so much of my life thinking about the future and worrying about stuff. To say what you want — it’s hard, isn’t it?”