Ignored by record labels for nearly a decade, Brit pop-rockers The 1975 carved their own
path.
Creating a genre-spanning, signature sound, they earned platinum sales numbers and chart-topping
airplay.
The journey to the top wasn't easy, but mainstream rejection was hardly the worst of it.
Like all great millennial artists, the 1975 are hiding an emo past, and the band has reluctantly
admitted as much.
According to Rolling Stone, singer and guitarist Matt Healy is an "encyclopedia of obscure
bands" from the '90s and early aughts, including Joan of Arc and American Football, which more
or less led an entire subset of early '90s emo rock.
Healy told Rolling Stone in 2016,
"I was never, like, a super cool dude, walking-down-getting-laid-in-a-leather-jacket kind of teenager.
I was listening to Bright Eyes really neurotically.
He was like the Dylan of the time."
If you take away the '80s-inspired synths, the 1975 aren't all that different than their
emo heroes.
Healy told The Guardian in 2016 that the band rose up out of the same foundation of middle-class
boredom that drove the success of many emo bands, and it showed up in their music, at
least, at the start.
In 2018, he described their trajectory to Rolling Stone, saying,
"We'd been the best emo band out of Manchester in 2009, and then the worst pop band of 2015."
Drummer George Daniel also spoke to Rolling Stone about the emo genre's influence on the
band, telling Rolling Stone,
"People really relate to it, this emo-ish kind of thing.
It's the new emo.
If you take the word, emo at face value, where it came from emotional music, not the pop-punk
crossover nonsense...It addressed stuff like depression and talking about relationships."
The 1975 may be one of the biggest modern pop bands in the U.K., but their ethics are
punk through and through.
The band led the charge with a DIY spirit that ultimately found them success on entirely
their own terms.
According to an interview in The Fader, the lads played their first shows at a town hall
in Wilmslow, the small Manchester suburb where they grew up.
As frontman Matt Healy put it,
"[It was] our little version of a hardcore scene.
Just a lot of drinking and playing music really badly."
The band's manager, Jamie Oborne, discovered the group through MySpace, and they didn't
release their first EP for a decade, largely because they were rejected from every single
major label that could have supported their work.
The struggle was often dispiriting.
Healy told Gigwise in 2013,
"When you've got grown-ups, loads of grown-ups with loads of money when you've got no money,
and every single one of them comes to your house telling you're not good enough and you
don't actually know what you're doing, it really hurts."
But the streak of rejection only left them down, but not out.
Healy said,
"It made us think...let's do it ourselves.
They don't know what they are talking about.'"
Oborne ended up creating the label Dirty Hit specifically for the band, and the group is
still signed with them today.
The 1975 have been in a band since they were 13-year-old students at Wilmslow High School
in Cheshire, England.
For a band that's been around for nearly two decades, you'd think you'd have heard of them
before they dropped their string of EPs in 2012, and the truth is that were you local
enough to them, you might have.
They've changed their name so much it's hard to keep track.
According to NME, the band went by the names Me and You Versus Them, Forever Enjoying Sex,
Talkhouse, The Slowdown, Bigsleep, and Drive Like I Do.
The latter project performed the song "Sex" before it became a massive hit with The 1975.
Despite this, lead singer Matt Healy maintains that the groups are separate entities.
So, where did The 1975 come from?
According to an old press bio, he was flipping through an old book that was given to him
by an eccentric artist acquaintance when he was 19 years old.
Inside, he found a series of strange scribblings, with the notes dated in an unusual format
as "1st June, The 1975."
The notes left an impression, but that timestamp left the biggest impression of all.
Healy said,
"I was quite freaked out when I read it, the use of the word 'The' really stuck with me.
It was the perfect band name."
If you couldn't tell by the sheer number of times frontman Matt Healy stuck out his tongue
and gyrated during the band's performance on Saturday Night Live, the Cheshire rockers
are total trolls.
They didn't need the majors, and they really didn't need the critics.
They do what they want.
According to Rolling Stone, the band purposely made I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are
So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It as extra as possible to clap back at the critics who
tried to define them, probably starting with that mouthful of a title.
Instead of kneeling to critics and tweaking their sound for approval, the band doubled
down on everything that got critiqued, to great results.
Healy told Rolling Stone,
"Every criticism, every compliment, every conversation surrounding that first album
has been included and been exaggerated, whether it be the accusations of me being like I swallowed
a dictionary.
There's more emo.
The poppier bits are poppier, the Eighties bits are Eighties-er.
It's more like a John Hughes film.
It's like a distillation of everything that preceded it, so that's one of the things that
I'm really proud of."
That's one way to handle criticism.
The 1975 are a band that revels in aesthetics.
During the press cycle for their first album, the band primarily used black and white imagery
with their now-iconic box logo.
For I Like it When you Sleep, they snapped into neon technicolor, but this idea wasn't
sparked out of nothing.
The band was inspired by their fans.
In other words, don't ever discredit the artistry of a fangirl on Tumblr.
"After we finished touring the first album, I would go on, like, Tumblr and stuff like
that and see what the fans were doing now that they were bored.
And they started coloring everything pink."
The band ended up doing the same thing as the prior cycle, releasing images to correspond
with new songs, but this time they used pink neon signs.
Thus, the millennial pink version of The 1975 was born.
Matty Healy possesses the kind of big rockstar energy that makes leather pants and a blazer
sans shirt look like business casual.
It's all about attitude, and like the Mick Jaggers and Keith Richards that came before
him, Healy's got an air of confidence that's somehow wildly unapologetic, charmingly British,
and in the words of The Guardian, big enough to fill the Royal Albert Hall.
(Americans, that's roughly half the size of Madison Square Garden).
This is a guy who once pondered to the newspaper about whether or not he could be the Messiah,
which The Tab included in a list of the, quote, "wankiest stuff" he's ever said.
It's not just that Healy believes in himself.
According to him, he's basically in his favorite band.
In 2018, he boldly told Billboard,
"There are no big bands who are doing anything as interesting as us right now."
And he also confessed to The Guardian in 2016,
"I know I am pretentious, but I'd be the first person to tell you that.
And I'm not apologizing...It's way more pretentious to pretend you don't care about something."
According to a Billboard interview, frontman Matt Healy always had a, quote, "deep, carnal
desire to be sedated," which is why he started smoking weed at a young age.
Part of this desire had to do with the singer's complicated relationship with sleep and recurring
nightmares.
It wasn't just sleep that made Healy gravitate to heavier drugs.
As the band rose in popularity, the singer graduated to opiates and anxiety medication
to help him cope with tour life.
He told Rolling Stone,
"It was the polarity between connecting with 10,000 people and then going to a hotel room
by myself.
Mass acceptance and genuine loneliness.
It was easier to mediate that with drugs."
By 2017, Healy was in the throes of heroin addiction, and his drug use became such a
problem that his tour manager confiscated his passport so he couldn't run away and score.
According to The Fader, the singer got his passport number tattooed on his forearm because
he'd pass out from narcotics, leaving the tour manager in charge of filling out his
landing card on international flights.
Healy penned the Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships track "It's Not Living If It's
Not With You" as his grand ode to the devastating drug.
Matt Healy's four-year heroin addiction came to a head in July 2017 when The 1975 headlined
Latitude Festival, marking the end of their I Like it When You Sleep album cycle.
The frontman told The Guardian,
"That's where it all kicked off.
It should have been a massive celebration.
And it was for me, but it wasn't for everyone else.
I had just got back to the UK and everyone knew the first thing I was going to do."
The festival served as an intervention of sorts.
According to Billboard, drummer George Daniel discovered that Healy had been using drugs
again, and the singer promised he would stop when they flew to Los Angeles to record their
next album.
A month later, they left to record, but Healy had changed his mind.
During dinner, under the influence of benzodiazepines, Healy decided to tell his bandmates that he
wasn't getting clean after all, and that they would just have to deal with it.
Healy didn't take long to realize his mistake.
According to Billboard, he woke up the next morning embarrassed, and told Daniel that
he needed rehab.
Four months after the initial Latitude intervention, he checked himself into a rehab clinic in
Barbados for about seven weeks.
The 1975 haven't been afraid of touching hot-button topics in their lyrics, but according to Billboard,
it's rare that the band makes an explicit political statement.
We saw it once when singer Matt Healy spoke about Brexit at Glastonbury Festival, the
day after the public vote took place.
We saw it again in 2020, when the band vowed to fight for gender equality in the music
industry.
When the lineup for Reading and Leeds Festival was announced in February 2020, it didn't
take long for the internet to notice it was severely lacking in gender diversity.
According to MixMag, only 20 of the 91 acts announced in February had female members.
Only three main stage acts included women.
This drew criticism from legendary Radio 1 DJ Annie Mac and sprung The 1975 into action.
In a shocking tweet, Healy vowed to only play festivals that were gender balanced going
forward.
"Take this as me signing this contract...From now I will and believe this is how male artist[s]
can be true allies."
He also made the observation that from a professional standpoint, this probably wasn't the smartest
move, adding,
"I'm sure my agents are having kittens right now but times up man people need to act and
not chat."
Notes on a Conditional Form features the band's first ever collaboration, and it's not with
the usual pop contenders like DJ Khalid or Nicki Minaj.
Instead, they teamed up with Greta Thunberg, the teenager whose passionate speech on climate
change sparked a global movement.
Thunberg's voice can be heard at the start of "The 1975" slamming an older generation
who's failed the planet.
According to NME, singer Matt Healy and drummer George Daniel went to Thunberg's native Sweden
to record the track.
It was one of the few times the singer has been starstruck, which probably happens infrequently
once you become an actual rock star.
Healy told Pedestrian TV, quote, "Greta is the most punk person I've ever met in my life."
He also found her to be a source of inspiration.
"I'd been kind of, not pessimistic, but just quite a depressed outlook on the situation.
Kind of like a nihilistic, almost, attitude of 'oh well, we're all f---ed.'
Then after meeting her...I kind of left with a bit of hope, you know?"
In addition to Thunberg's guest spot, The 1975 has put its money where its mouth is.
The band planned to donate all proceeds from the track to Extinction Rebellion and is working
to limit its own impact on the environment.
The band's label's office also phased out plastic packaging like CD jewel cases and
shrink wrap and opted for more environmentally friendly lightweight vinyl.
The album cycle for Notes on a Conditional Form presents a lot of firsts for frontman
Matt Healy.
At a time when the band should be resting on its laurels, it might just prove to be
the toughest album cycle yet as the star relearns how to live his life without hard drugs.
He said during an appearance on Skavlan,
"You just got to take it day by day as the cliche says, you know what I mean?
Because you will just freak yourself out."
"I'm doing all the things now that I used to do when I took drugs all the time."
Healy told The Fader that he's only slipped up a couple of times since his rehab stint.
He used heroin once before the release of A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships
and again at the start of 2019, but says the addiction is fully a thing of the past.
If it's not, Healy's bandmates are prepared to lose it all.
Manager Jamie Oborne told The Fader,
"The boys and I all feel the same way, which is that we don't want to do this if it means
losing him.
I can't imagine a life without Matthew."
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