When my sister and I spoke with frontman Matthew Healy of The 1975 the day before his birthday, he was in Berlin, readying himself for a show. “Bowie lived here with Iggy Pop,” he mentioned. An amazing city, we agreed, an artful place. But more, it’s an apropos city from which a man such as Healy may speak: a famously creative and evolving city in cross-reference with its darker earlier years, a place steeped in music that straddles aesthetics and histories of pasts and futures both.
The 1975’s newest album, I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It, is both confidently new and knowingly self-referential to past works, both their own and the music that inspired it. “The new album almost makes jokes about the naiveté of the first album; there’s a wisdom or knowing about myself that replaces the naiveté,” he said. “The first album was about, ‘When will I resolve myself?’ or ‘When will I better myself?’… This album is more about self-acceptance.”
The world at large, too, is beginning to accept — and embrace and pine for and adore — what The 1975 brings to the table. From a narrow-minded, categorical PR standpoint, they’re slightly confounding and have been a lightning rod for criticisms and furrowed brows: Are they sincerely emotional, or imitatively? Are they reinvigorating and innovating the past, or thieving from it? Can they really be that talented and indie and famous and beautiful? “It annoys the fucking hell out of me,” Healy said of the somewhat sex-symbol status he and his bandmates have earned in some circles and the suspicions that have ensued. “When I started the band, I didn’t even think about what we looked like. I’m an anti-sex symbol; I’m definitely on the weird end of the spectrum.”