ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: BEAT MAGAZINE, JANUARY 2020
The 1975 aren’t in the business of making records to be digested and thrown away with ease.
Come April 2020, their new album - Notes On A Conditional Form - will be released. An album that has already spawned three distinctive tracks (‘People’, ‘Frail State of Mind’ and the Greta Thunberg-featuring ‘The 1975’), Notes is not simply Album Number Four for the British group. It’s a sign of the band’s continuous strive for completing a chapter of their career that is more flourished and intriguing than what came before.
“It’s not an environmental record,” Matty Healy is quick to assert of The 1975’s next venture.
“I’ve led with the Greta song into ‘People’, so now a lot of people are like, “Oh, it’s the environmental record”, but it’s not. A Brief Enquiry… had the title of Into Online Relationships [and] that set the tone. It’s a record about being a person: fear, love, the human experience. There’s a cloak of that idea and this [album] has the same thing. The main thing I’m scared of on this record is bigger environmental concerns, but it’s not an environmental record.”
When it comes to The 1975’s presence in a music culture far different from the one they entered in 2002, Healy is open about how they’ve weathered a cultural storm of streaming and chart-data led success.
“The artists whose single streams are in the billions, people don’t buy their albums, necessarily.” he says. Using pop music as an example, Healy describes his perception of the singles vs albums debate.
“Ellie Goulding [for example],” he says. “Not slagging her off, just using her pop style; people will listen to her music at the gym and they will listen to it on playlists. They’ll put the ‘Pop’ playlist on and it will get out there. When it comes to her putting out a record, which is someone saying, “Will you invest in my lifestyle?” or, “Do you want to invest in me, as an idea?”...I have a lot of “Yes, I want to invest in you as an idea,” and less, “I’ll pop this on when I’m doing whatever. We don’t have a [really] transient audience like that.”
“I’ve said this before, but the Drakes of the world, they’re professionals at keeping people’s attention for three minutes.” Healy adds.
“They can do that again and again. I’m not that good at that. A single will happen accidentally throughout the myriad of writing songs. The way that we express ourselves is like longform. I can do it and I do it occasionally, I’d love it if we can make it work where I get a big idea down in three minutes. We’ve always been an albums band.”
Reflecting on almost two decades of The 1975, Healy is frank about how he has matured as a musician and what looking down the barrel of a new decade is like for him. In short: it’s exciting.
“When I was a teenager, culture and everything said, “To be an alternative artist, you get a deal with a small indie and that’s how you do it.”” he explains.
“By the time I’d put out my first record, I was already...I didn’t have people from record labels [calling], I didn’t have any of that, there was already a freedom to it. I suppose I am in a privileged position, but the most privileged thing is that I created that privileged position. I can kind of be proud of it.”
“We’ve proven that, with luck and with the zeitgeist, and with it being the right time, you can do what you want. The coolest thing about The 1975 is that this past 10 years has been the dissolvement of genre, especially with us. I see artists like Billie Eilish, these artists who are fearless now. I love that. We’ve definitely been part of that new sense of freedom with young kids.”
The first time I interviewed Healy, we were both in our early 20’s. The band’s profile was growing rapidly off the back of their debut EP. The second time we crossed paths, The 1975 was well and truly settled into their role as a breath of fresh air coming out of the UK indie scene, transitioning with ease into mainstream pop success.
“The culture has changed quite a lot.” he says.
“A lot of people who come from indie or punk grow in their sense of wanting to do something, but they don’t actually have the ability to do it. I think because of our ability as producers and musicians, we can actually challenge ourselves and do things that are a bit more viscerally powerful.”
Now both eyeing up our next decade in an industry that has changed so significantly for each of us, on stage and behind the scenes, Healy is reflective on his personal approach to the craft and consuming of music as a fan.
“The whole thing is about not being bored.” he laughs. “It’s not about striving to be bold, it’s about avoiding being bored. If you’ve been in a band with your best friends for 17 years, doing anything for too long is boring. Making one type of music is boring. That’s been really reflective of the way the culture has been. I think that we’ve been constantly balancing back and forward between people just getting that every time we make a record.”
“I’ve had to learn that that sense of freedom I get when something excites me, just chase that. Chase it, that’s the only thing I can really do.”