I’ve seen The 1975 described as a band purely for critics and also a band purely for teenage girls on Tumblr, long before former Tumblr obsessives became critics themselves. Though the same four guys in the band today have been playing together since 2002, they were viewed as an industry plant and (not wrongly) nepo babies, an obnoxiously handsome bunch of himbos with an obnoxious single called “Sex” that sounded like the first stirrings of the Emo Nite cottage industry.

I can assure you that some people I’ve worked with viewed The 1975 as the single worst band to come around in their lifetime – this is a bit of a paraphrase, but not an exaggeration. Both would come to pass and in the time since, The 1975 have held a vast number of seemingly contradictory reputations in the public eye. But, despite having self-explanatory song titles like “Sex,” “Chocolate,” “Girls,” “The City,” and “M.O.N.E.Y.,” The 1975 had an air of seeing themselves as important. Thanks to two solid years of priming the pump with a handful of EPs, stylish videos, and Tumblr-native hype, the success of The 1975 felt preordained. For others, it’s more like Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not or Hot Fuss, a veritable Greatest Hits that the band never topped because getting more artful and ambitious worked against their true strengths. People who later came to appreciate The 1975’s more artful and ambitious records see the debut as a Pablo Honey, Adrenaline, or I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love – an album whose success created a platform for greater triumphs but is only worth revisiting purely for nostalgia or historical context. In the past, that typically meant “Matty Healy doing absolutely nothing at all,” and indeed, last week gave us an opportunity to celebrate the 10th anniversary of The 1975’s debut (alongside the release of Live At The Gorilla, an end-to-end run through The 1975). Needless to say, The 1975 could seriously use an infusion of goodwill before they begin the latest leg of the ‘At Their Very Best’ tour. To put things into perspective, this guy was linked to Taylor Swift in 2023 and still hd the single worst year of his career. But as a man who can probably now relate to Healy once said, “bigmouth strikes again” – and due to his inexplicable and indefensible rants about race, pornography, Ice Spice, and Malaysian law (amongst others), many feel that Healy has no right to take his place in the human race. In most ways, 2023 has been a fairly standard “off” year for The 1975 – bustling tour and festival itinerary, clearing out the archives, simultaneously hinting at future projects and possibly never making a record again, gossip about Matty Healy’s latest substance issues and/or celebrity hookup, and of course, Healy making a whole bunch of unforced errors in his interviews.

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