The 1975 are the best band of the last decade, and I don't even think it's particularly close.
I absolutely would not say that half-heartedly. It would be so genuinely painful for me to read this back in five years and think, "God, I got that so embarrassingly wrong," that I would never broach the topic unless I truly meant it. And I truly mean it.
For starters, these men, and particularly frontman Matty Healy, are songwriters. This is a non-negotiable in any nomination for this title. I have no interest in any band that stands on a stage pummeling the audience with amplifier noise, trying to deafen everyone into thinking they're good. I want bands to show me they're good by writing freaking incredible songs, and that's exactly what The 1975 do. Point me to a band that has made a better political statement in the last decade than "Love It If We Made It." Point me to a band with a song that drips with more sincerity than "I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)." Point me to a band with a song James Taylor and Paul Simon would envy more than "Paris." And however you slice it, tracks like "If You're Too Shy (Let Me Know)" and "Happiness" are pop songwriting masterclasses that I would argue fall next to ABBA and Michael Jackson in terms of pure mastery of the craft. The hooks breathe with life and are catchy because they're clever, not because they're mind-numbingly simple.
Perhaps most impressive to me is how fluid and versatile The 1975 have been with their sound while still making sure it all feels plucked from the same palette. There's this misconception that great bands need to change their sound over time in order to remain great. This is wrong. Great bands don’t change their sound; they challenge their sound. They push the limits of their sound to the brink of excess, and just before they fall over the edge, they pull it back and distill that sound into something more focused. It's a pattern that shows up time and time again in the discography of great artists, and The 1975 is no exception. Their self-titled debut was a 16-track stamp of what their core aesthetic is. I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it, as the name implies, took those core aesthetics and drove everything into excess territory. A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships saw the band return with a more concise project but reincorporate some of the left-field digitized sounds of their early EPs. Notes on a Conditional Form doubled-down on those rediscovered electronic tones and pushed everything (including the runtime) to peak overindulgence. And although it's not released yet, the singles off their fifth album Being Funny in a Foreign Language, specifically "Happiness" and "I'm In Love With You," appear to show The 1975 once again reeling back this excess and returning to the jingly pop outfit they wear so well, but this time more focused than ever. It's this push-pull dynamic that makes a band evolve in a meaningful way. It's not a directionless meander around different genres. It's an endless exploration around a core identity.
The last thing I'll gush about is just how striking I find their visuals, specifically their music videos and their stage design. I once heard Matty say the following in an interview:
"I was watching Blue Velvet the other night and was reading about David Lynch. He has this amazing thing where [someone asks him] ‘How do you make your movies look like that?’ He says, ‘I read the script. The first thing I think of, I write down, and then I go to the set and I film that.'"
Everything about their visuals made sense when I heard that quote because that's precisely how they feel: like the band listened to each song, wrote down exactly what scene popped into their heads, and committed to that being the music video concept before anyone had time to overthink it. Their stage design for "Sincerity is Scary" is probably my favorite concert visual I've ever seen, not because it was particularly complex, but because something about Matty strutting and sliding on a moving sidewalk in his meme-worthy rabbit hat as a city block pans on the jumbo screens behind him felt like it perfectly captured the essence of the song. The stage setup and music video weren't separate entities from the song itself; they were the spirit of the song incarnate. I would give this same comment about almost all of their visuals. Matty rivals David Byrne in his innate and intuitive sense for aesthetics, and it trickles into everything the band touches in a really gratifying way.
I could go on and on about the reasons I find The 1975 freaking brilliant. Matty is one of the most (if not the most) electrifying frontmen to watch perform, and he certainly has one of the most unique and relevant voices in this generation of musicians. The band is so shamelessly self-referential in their lyrics, music videos, and other mediums that their entire body of work feels like it exists within its own universe, and it's an extremely easy universe to get completely sucked into.
But none of what I said above is really that important. Because regardless of any of that quasi-philosophy I just preached, The 1975's music is just fun. It makes you want to dance. It might be a slow dance. It might be a mosh. Or it might be your standard "I can't stop my body from making these movements" night-out dance. But The 1975 makes you want to move, and that's probably more important than everything else I said combined.
If you're a fan of The 1975, great; I'm happy you found such a treat. If you don't feel like you've listened to them much or have written them off in the past, the joke's on you.
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