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... like this if you want me to follow you back ‘cause I don't know who is active here ❤️

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// R O B B E R S //

'Robbers' is a love song, it was originally inspired by my love of the Quentin Tarantino film 'True Romance', the story of an Elvis obsessed loner who falls in love and marries a prostitute. In the movie the couple run away to California after killing her pimp and stealing his drugs to start a new life financed by a once in a lifetime drug deal. It's the sentiment behind the film that appeals to me, the hopelessly romantic notion that two people can meet and instantly fall in love, an escape story where love is the highest law and conquers all against the odds. Characters like Bonnie and Clyde always appealed to me as a teenager - couples so intoxicated with one another that they fear nothing in the pursuit of the realization of each other, actions fueled by blind unconditional love.

'Robbers' is an ode to those relationships. The type of relationship all humans long for. All or nothing.

This video is about when love makes two people feel they are the centre of the universe.

- Matthew Healy

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Life lesson to tell the kids?

the empowerment of women is the most important thing - for everything. The progression of everything necessary and positive 

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What's an anobrain?

an obvious choice 

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/ / H E A R T O U T / /

"With the video for Heart Out I wanted to return to the classic performance scene. I love a good performance video and wanted to try my hand at creating something that represented my grandeur and slightly deluded sense of self, whilst also adhering to the simplistic rules of a performance. The video is about narcissism, belief and delusion in equal measure. It represents how antiquated and romanticized visions of past and future shed a blazing light on the present and in turn provoke a self-analysis that soon shifts from the material to the ideological.

"It was in this state of excitement and obsession where the ‘Heart Out’ video was born. Obviously I can delve into the artistic vision of the video - what it means to me, the subtext and my own emotional investment within it - but in doing so I fear defacing what the video truly is about, at face value. It’s a bunch of kids who think they’re rockstars. And… They are. x."

Matthew Healy

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// S E T T L E D O W N //

I used to have a reoccurring dream when I was younger. The narrative was loosely based, but the setting was always the surrounding areas of where my parents grew up. I think I was slightly obsessed with how certain, bleak areas of Northern England contained my history and the soul of my family, my psyche - I always felt connected and disconnected at the same time. Metaphorically and physically I would visit these places frequently as a youngster and in turn have used them as the setting to a lot of the stories in The 1975 - the North East was the visual setting to my formative years.

I suppose, like any narrative, the meaning and the connotations within the story are subjective. I’ve always been quite fascinated with the potency of same sex relationships, plutonic or otherwise. I was brought up in a very open minded environment, somewhere I felt that, whoever I was, I would be accepted. With this understanding I was also very aware of others, school friends, acquaintances - whom, due to where we lived, probably didn’t have such a comfortable place to grow up, we were unaffected and affected by taboos and the small minded at the same time.  I’ve dreamt the story of these two boys on countless occasions - every time drawing a different conclusion on its meaning.

With ‘Settle Down’ I wanted to make a story about the extension of that dream, a video that explores love, a video that was as fantastical, consuming and limitless as the love we all chase and desire. Love as I have always imagined.

So upon meeting Nadia, who directed the video, I told her about my dream. We sat for hours looking through pictures and talking - it was decided in those moments. We were just to film my dream. The process of making this video was so intensely exciting for me as I was finally working through and figuring out exactly what this place, this story and these characters meant to me. I think now that I understand it. But I’m totally open to suggestions / interpretations. X

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// G I R L S //

“When we released our last video (Sex), people really reacted to the fact that it was in colour. There was a lot of conjecture and talk surrounding it - due to the fact that it was an unexpected stylistic change. It was brought to our attention that certain people thought we were ‘conforming to a record companies wishes’ along with other expected and unexpected clichés. Obviously this couldn’t be further from the truth, we are lucky enough to be surrounded by a group of individuals who’s mantra centers on facilitating our creative wishes, we found the whole idea of us being told what to do fascinating. The story of the band who suffer at the hands of a record label shortly after a delirious rise is a tale as old as time. So we kinda wanted to make a tongue in cheek video about it. Twinned with our love of 80’s pop, it’s innocence, grandiosity and conceptual ideas in music videos - we wanted to make a video about a record label’s attempt at enforced conformity. We got our mate Adam down to a studio in Los Angeles at the start of our USA tour, got 4 models and made a video about us not wanting to make a video.” - Matthew Healy

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Before Matty Healy could go forth and do battle with the world again, he had to get the small matter of doing battle with himself out of the way first. The 17 songs on The 1975’s remarkable, incandescent new album I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it give some hints as to what that battle involves. Now, I could make a few guesses about what goes on in Matty’s head but they’d be stabs in the dark – besides, I’m not sure even Matty knows what’s going on in there - or he does, but it changes from minute to minute - so how could we? Confidence, anguished self-doubt, morbid introspection and ceaseless self-laceration surely play a part; ditto arrogance, urgency, passion, panic; add to that already over-crowded space ambition, exhaustion, elation and dejection. As one of the bands inner circle says, “Matthew has what every great frontman has: a massive ego, and extremely low self-worth. That’s great for a frontman; for a human being’s mental health, though, it’s debilitating. His confidence is sky-high but wafer-thin. He has amazing self-belief and resilience, and a huge work ethic, but all of that is shadowed by a darker side.” When Matty sings on the new track If I Believe You, “If I’m lost, then how can I find myself?” his fans will identify at once. The relationship between The 1975 and their fanbase is built on an empathic, almost telepathic understanding. It helps explain why the band’s gigs have the fervour of a revivalist meeting; and why, no matter how big The 1975 have become, they remain conscious of the vital part their fans play in everything they do. The thought of being aloof, remote pop icons inaccessible behind a velvet rope, is anathema to them. “We’ve got fans, and then we’ve got fans. Why would you want to feel above that? So much of the power in what we’re trying to do comes from their emotional involvement in and understanding of the way I feel things. I’ve never dramatised or fetishised the reality of addiction or flirted with the idea of suicide and subjects like that, but nor have I shirked them, and I think that’s why they relate to us. I’m convinced that what people really want to invest in when it comes to music is something they can genuinely identify with. Otherwise, what? It’s a backdrop to our lives? Music is more than that. It’s everything.” That attitude informs every note, word and texture on the new album. It is as if everything the band have ever done, every setback and triumph they’ve experienced, has been leading up to this point. From the opening bars of The 1975, a reworked version of the track that opened their debut album, to the rough-demo acoustica of She Lays Down, via the monster earworms Love Me, She’s American, The Sound and This Must Be My Dream, the ineffably beautiful ballads Change of Heart, Somebody Else and Paris, the incredibly fragile and poignant Nana, which Matty wrote about his grandmother’s death, the crepuscular ambience and troubled self-inquiry of Please Be Naked, Lostmyhead and the title track, and the anguished stock-taking and reckless candour of The Ballad of Me and My Brain and Loving Someone, the album embarks on a journey of twists and turns, its unorthodox but brilliantly realised sequencing – and that insanely long album title – is a thrilling affirmation of what makes this band so defiantly individual and steadfastly indifferent to the tired old formulas of the pop machine. When The 1975 first emerged in 2012 with the Facedown EP, it was instantly clear that this was a band that were going to be controversial, even problematic, for some. Their sound was unashamedly glamorous (one of Matty’s favourite words), the lyrics heart-on-sleeve, spill-your-guts confessional, their music brazenly diverse. And, in their frontman, the band possessed a singer who saw live performance as a precipice just asking to be jumped from. Matty’s head might be a mix of impenetrable fog and startling lucidity, but he has always been totally clear about the primacy of unabashed charisma and fierce commitment in the makeup of a lead singer. Never apologise has, he says, long been the band’s mantra. The four school friends who formed a band 13 years ago in Wilmslow, south of Manchester, may be unusually accessible to their fans, but they retain a fierce, circle-the-wagons mentality when it comes to their creative space, and their dealings with the music industry. “We are very much a product of our environment,” says Matty. “We’re like brothers, we really are. For 13 years we’ve been in the same room together. The band has always been the nucleus of everything.” This mentality is also the product of their unhappy experiences, in their early days, of record label indifference. “There’s still this misconception out there,” says the band’s manager Jamie Oborne, “that they had it easy, that they signed a massive record deal and immediately had a hit single. The truth is different. No one wanted to sign them – no one. Labels, agents, publishers, none of them wanted to know. I tried for about four years to get someone to help us facilitate and support our vision. All I was met with was, ‘We don’t understand them; they sound too different from one song to the next. Radio will hate them,’ and I always thought, ‘but that’s exactly what’s amazing about them’, Matty’s mantra of how they create in the way they consume.” When the band’s self-titled debut album – released on the independent label Dirty Hit, which Jamie had set up specifically for The 1975 – entered the UK chart at no 1 in September 2013, there was certainly a feeling of vindication. More importantly, it cemented in their minds the sense that, if the band were to mean anything, they had to stick to their guns, trust their instincts and resist outside interference. 10 years of raised hopes and broken promises, of missteps and false starts, had hardened the four friends, and now, with the prize suddenly within their grasp, they weren’t about to change tack. That old “they sound too different from one song to the next” response had been thrown back at their detractors, after all; and, as the saying goes, he who laughs last laughs longest. As Matty says with real fire, such attitudes strike the band’s generation as prehistoric. “The historic adherence to one type of anything is so pointless, and it’s not something that ever enters my mind. If I’m inspired by something, my attitude is, ‘I’m taking that’. If anyone has a problem with that, well, I don’t care – nobody cares about that sort of thing anymore. Besides, in 2016, everything has been done. You just have to try and do it better, which is what we’ve done. My generation consumes music in this completely non-linear way, and we reflect that because that’s how we create. Fifteen-year-olds are listening to A$AP Rocky but also to something way over on the other side from that. Why create one type of music when nobody consumes one type of music? The idea of rules is completely farcical.” That’s not an official manifesto, but as I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it demonstrates, it could be. Who else but The 1975 would follow the pop-perfect FM-radio groove and arch, self-knowing lyrics of She’s American with If I Believe You? The latter song billows with gospel choirs, cascading harp and haunting trumpet: a devotional hymn of tormented, existential inquiry. Most bands, beholden to major-label caution, would have buried If I Believe You at the back end of the album. Not The 1975, and they’re right; placed as it is, the song is devastating precisely because of the contrast. The band’s beloved 80s sonic palette dominates the new songs, with echoes throughout of Peter Gabriel, Scritti Politti, INXS, Hall & Oates, Jam & Lewis and Tears For Fears; but there are other reference points that darken the brew – both Lostmyhead and the title track I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it have a Sigur Ros-like expansiveness and complexity - testament, as is the whole album, to the role played by George Daniel, a sonic architect of extraordinary inventiveness and ambition, with whom Matty wrote the album. As Matty is quick to admit, recording sessions were often fraught and always intense, though they were joyous, too. In the early stages of recording, both he and George were, he says, “in different ways, in a very bad place”. Years of solid touring had taken their toll, and there were moments where the pair struggled with the burden of creating a follow-up to their debut. “George and I are like brothers, we had never left each other’s side. We complete each other. And my problems at that time separated us a little bit. It catalysed the troubles that he had and solidified all of the issues that I was having in return, and it became this really dark time. And born out of that was The Ballad of Me and My Brain. So, now, retrospectively I can think it was all okay, but it really fucked us up as a couple – because we are a couple, really. The distance that we travelled away from each other turned out to be a really important part of the album. When George got better, the unity we felt when we both got back together was like I’d been away from my wife for six months and I’d just picked her up at the airport and it was sunny and we were going on holiday. I know that sounds mad, but it’s true” “The vocabulary that George and I share is unspoken, it’s like shorthand. There is a bit in Nana where it all stops, and I remember George saying, ‘Let’s just put a memory in there; let’s just have it open up and your vocal can become distant and you can put a memory in there’ and I was like: ‘Fucking hell.’ And we’d often get what we call these phantoms – little harmonics and ghosts notes, moments that are created by harmonies of certain things playing into other things. Sometimes I’d say to George, ‘Turn that bit up,’ and he’d say, ‘There is nothing there.’” These sessions were, Matty says, all about trust, all about the bond they first forged back at school. “There are all these big-name producers, but for me they’re not doing anything as interesting as George is. He would always say that he didn’t know what he was doing, and I’d be like, ‘That is where our band comes from; that’s the beauty of it.’ What we were in pursuit of was how we used to feel when we made music originally, unburdened by any fear, or thinking ‘Grown-ups are going to hear this and they’ll probably slag it off.’ It took us a while to get into that head space, but once we had made our world, one studio, four walls, four months of not leaving, just living there, we found it. The painful bits were done.” Lyrically, the new album reflects the upheavals, triumphs, traumas and losses in Matty’s life over the past three years. His lyrics are alternately catty, tender, merciless, cocksure, self-recriminatory, pleading, narcissistic and remorseful – a distillation of the conversation that goes on unceasingly in his head. “I think our fans understand the vulnerability because it’s very much their vulnerability as well. They recognise this weird loner who flirts with these things and gets it wrong. I used to think, ‘If I’m successful I am going to be able to go into all of these cool rooms, and I’ll just be one of them, but I’m not, I’m still me and still an idiot and I still get nervous about stuff and change my personality a little bit to talk to somebody new. Have you spent any time with modern pop stars recently? You stand there and think, ‘You’ve got a beautiful face, but what have you got to say? And can you really be best friends with every popular person on Instagram?’ Remember at the Grammys when you’d have Paul Simon next to George Harrison and David Bowie? That was what that used to be reserved for – people who had worked at their craft to get to the point where people wanted to look at pictures of them together because they represented something, an ideal that had been worked for and achieved justifiably, as opposed to having an iPhone and a fucking record deal.” Letting other people in remains as big a problem as ever, Matty admits (and several of the new songs address this). “There was this time when my ex-girlfriend called me, and she said, ‘You lack all that you admire.’ And I was just like, ‘Wow.’ And this is my whole thing about self-obsession: why am I so self-obsessed that I can’t even have a girlfriend because they then become an ambassador for me and that makes me uncomfortable; because I can’t have anyone running off and being an ambassador for me.” Characteristically, Matty lets out a self-deflating chuckle as he says this, before continuing, “What I’ve learnt with happiness is that those who seek happiness for themselves seek victory without war. It’s the journey that’s the thing, the whole point of it. I have this thing with living in the moment and being happy; I find a lot of the time I miss the notion of ‘now’ in my day-to-day life because I am so worried about being happy and in the present. I just fucking miss it. I have that all the time, this constant issue. I’ve lived my whole life retrospectively romanticising things and writing about them.” What’s going to be interesting now, says Jamie Oborne, is the fact that, “Matty’s been looking inwards for the entire year, and now, all of a sudden, his gaze is outwards, and he has to become what he sees as a salesman. So there’s that stark duality. He labours over his art so much, the whole band does, that we all struggle to be in the present. He lives his life by extremes; he’s either totally committed, or a chronic procrastinator. It’s a cyclical thing. He judges himself extremely harshly. The further we go, and no matter how many opportunities he gets to bash away at what he always calls ‘the pursuit of excellence’, he will always want to better himself, to make the band better.” Matty, Ross, Adam and George have made an album of breathtaking scope, ambition, depth and beauty, an album that will come to define 2016, and be looked back on as a game-changer. You sense that, on one level, Matty sort of knows this. For him to 100% believe it, though, well, that wouldn’t be Matt Healy, would it? The question we need to ask ourselves is this: would we have it any other way?

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Matty ✮ Settle Down video (3/4)

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THE INTERVIEW: THE 1975

The 1975 have been a long time coming. The four met at secondary school, started jamming in each other’s bedrooms throughout their teenage years and finally got around to releasing an EP last year – nearly ten years after writing their first song – before signing to a mate’s record label ‘when they were ready’. Their debut album is due out this summer and with 2013 touted as the ‘return of the guitar band’ we decide to get to know the frontrunners a little better.

TALK US THROUGH HOW THE BAND FORMED?

We didn’t really start a band per se, we were friends and we just started picking up instruments and messing about. None of us had picked an instrument particularly, we were all big fans of music and just tinkered with lots of different things. So when we all started playing music together it was a natural evolution, an organic process really. We started playing in punk cover bands and by the time we were 18 or 19 we were supporting our mates who were in more established bands – but we never felt the necessity to put anything out until August last year.

SO AT WHAT POINT DID IT BECOME MORE SERIOUS?

We’ve always believed that we could do it but retrospectively, when I think about it now, we’ve had quite a lot of foresight, we were very aware that there was no rush. We’d seen bands put music out too early and it came back to bite them in the arse. It was just a stage in our lives that felt right, we were signed by an indie label – and before that had been winded and dined by some major labels when we were very young and not ready – and because we had big songs, everyone was very excited. But nobody at major labels has any balls and that was proven to us so we signed to our mates’ label in the UK and Vagrant in America and it just felt right. We had enough material that we were proud of as well. I don’t know if we would have worked if we were signed to a major. We have to pride ourselves on our conviction.

There’s a brilliant Kafka quote that’s: a camel is a horse designed by a committee. If you’ve got the idea of a horse in your mind and you then give it to twelve people you’re going to get a camel back. And that’s very much how I feel about this band. The devil’s in the detail – it’s the intricacies that make us who we are.

THE STORY BEHIND YOUR NAME HAS BEEN QUITE ROMANTICISED – WHERE’S THE TRUTH IN IT?

It’s become quite idealised, yeah. It’s a romantic story though. I was on holiday in Northern Majorca and I went for a walk and met an artist out there. We hung out a bit and I left with loads of literature that he gave me – I was a very impressionable 19-year-old boy. So I got the books home and read them and one had been treated like a diary by the previous owner, covered in scribblings. It wasn’t a suicide note as has been reported but it was obviously the demise of someone, you could tell from the writing, and the note was dated 1 June the 1975. It was the use of the word ‘the’ that stuck with me. I didn’t instantly think ‘oh I’m going to name my band that’ when we were trying to come up with a name I remembered that story.

A LOT OF YOUR MUSIC IS QUITE AMBIENT, AS WELL AS THE INDIE AND POP THAT WE’VE HEARD. HAVE YOU FOUND YOUR SOUND YET?

That’s the question that we’ve become fascinated with, and that has defined us recently. With the Facedown and Sex EP it brought quite a lot of critical acclaim upon us but also a lot of criticism because people were saying ‘do they know who they are’ or ‘what do they want to be’ and we got fascinated by it. We don’t listen to one type of music or consume any media in one linear format so we find it difficult to create in that way. It’s not even a conscious approach it’s just that our musical vocabulary has developed in that way. We’ve been living in each others pockets for ten years so our tastes and influences are the same, which makes it very coherent. The idea of searching within yourself to find what you want to project, or suffering from a lack of identity – everyone can relate to that. It’s a reflection to who we are as people. If you can manage to not have a defined sound over 16 tracks then you’re doing okay. I’m not harboured by that way of thinking.

DO YOU VIEW ANYONE AS COMPETITION?

I haven’t really thought about it you know. I’ve never really worried about the competition, it feels like the pressure is kind of off us a bit because if you are investing in our band you are investing in us – this is the only thing that we know how to do. It’s our only form of expression. We’regrouped in with the usual suspects – Palma Violets, Peace and Swim Deep but I would put us more along the likes of AlunaGeorge or the Weeknd. The people that we know and are close to musically are all in the R’n’B scene like Bareface or Tourist, so we don’t feel that much competition because we don’t see our sound the same as those we’re compared to. We’ve been called guitar ‘n’ B before and I love that.

WHO’S IMPRESSING YOU IN MUSIC RIGHT NOW?

Laura Mvula is great and we love A$AP Rocky more than belief. I met him outside our hotel – he recognised me from the Futures festival which was amazing but weird.  And also Kendrick Lamar, Tourist and obviously Aluna George and Disclosure. Our heads have always been buried in R’n’B and dance music so we identify with that.

DO YOU THINK CURRENT R’N’B IS GOING TO MOVE AWAY FROM THIS DANCE SOUND THAT IT’S LATCHED ON TO?

Hopefully there’ll just be a move towards something more organic. But currently I think music moves in waves, something wishy washy always follows something good. Look at what you had after Blur and Oasis – Travis! And then the Libertines came along and then the Arctic Monkeys which was great but then what did you get after – The Hooisers and the Wombats. The David Guetta scene has to die at some stage. We can live in hope at least.

YOU WORKED WITH MIKE CROSSEY ON THE ALBUM – HOW WAS THAT?

He’s now one of my closest friends. He understood how we worked and he understood that it can be quite unsettling moving away from a way of working that you’re used to. We were originally just going to do that album ourselves but he came on board after falling in love with the band and he didn’t steam roll over anything we did, and we listened to him because of that. I learned so much from him about producing. His technical understanding revitalised our creative process.

WHAT CAN WE EXPECT FROM THE ALBUM?

It’s very broad you know, and very ambitious. It doesn’t sound like the EPs even though ‘Sex’, ‘The City’ and ‘Chocolate’ are on the album. I’m not very good at retrospect, I have a lot more conviction about what I’m saying in the moment so most of my lyrics are quotes, like in ‘Sex’, most of that song was spoken at some point. That song was about four or five different girls, and a lot of them have picked up on it because they remember me saying those exact words to them!

YOU’RE ALSO SIGNED IN THE US TO VAGRANT. DO YOU THINK THE US WILL GET YOU?

I think they’ll get us more. They love the accent so that’s a start. Musically I think our album will work really well in America because even though it feels like a happy record most of the lyrics are not, they’re quite unsettling – like ‘Chocolate’ which is about my relationship with a particular drug and our relationship with the police in a very small middle class town.

WHAT ARE YOU HUNGRY FOR?

I’m hungry for seeing a really emotional validation in people through our music. What we’re starting to get now from people is a direct emotional response which has been quite moving. We’ve been writing music for nine years but before this tour hadn’t really performed our own music to people. I’m hungry to hear a story about how our music has affected somebody’s life – whether they listened to a song to get through something or whether they were inspired by listening to us, I’m hungry for a human connection.

Interview: hunger tv, feb 26th 2013

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edits of photos taken during iliwys 2016-2017

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Introducing... The 1975

“THE NEXT YEAR IS DEFINITELY GOING TO BE INTENSE, AND WE’RE NEVER GOING TO HAVE ANOTHER YEAR LIKE IT. IT’S GONNA BE AWESOME…” MATT HEALY, THE 1975.

Amidst the terraced houses of an affluent South Liverpool suburb lies The Motor Museum, the studio where Arctic Monkeys and Oasis recorded their first singles, Foals crafted both their critically acclaimed albums, and an unmentionably long list of acts put their signature sounds to record, all at the hands of Mike Crossey. Needless to say it is a bonafide (albeit anonymous) piece of musical history, which over the last six weeks has been home to The 1975 as they record their debut album.

A regular reader of the site will know that we are predicting big things for the Manchester four piece, and with the blogosphere in a frenzy and attention from Radio 1, it’s clear we’re not the only ones that are hedging our bets on their success. Their amalgamation of the visceral and the prolific is what makes them unique, combining surging indie-rock with atmospheric allure to great effect, learning from the mistakes of predecessors in their field (The Big Pink spring to mind).

We caught up with singer Matt Healy in Liverpool on a tense penultimate day of album sessions, with the group also readying the release of their second EP, Sex.

“IF YOU’VE GOT A SONG THEN YOU’VE GOT A SONG. IF YOU CANT DRESS IT UP IN A RELEVANT FORM THEN YOU’RE NOT A VERY GOOD SONGWRITER…”

You’ve gone by many names in the past, but your first EP “Facedown” was the first taste people got of “The 1975” as a finished product, how long was it in the making?

It was a very important time for us when we came to making it. “The City” and “Antichrist” go back quite far, and the blueprints of those songs were there long before Facedown. George and I wrote the other two tracks specifically for the EP, and that was a relatively quick process, because we knew exactly what we wanted.

Mike Crossey has produced some seminal albums in the past, how was it working with him?

We spoke to a few producers before making the album, and as we had produced “Facedown” ourselves and with the help of people like “Little Comets”, our main concern was that we wanted to produce our own album. However we weren’t naïve in the fact that there are people who have sold millions of records and are much better at doing it than us, so Mike approached us on a co-production level. He’s really shown us the ropes, but because of the way our band works a lot of the material was already there anyway.

So was your approach to the album more formulated than your EP’s as you had a producer on board?

Yeah it was a totally different approach, and although the majority of the songs have been finished as “The 1975” this album has been five years in the making, formed through the many different incarnations of the band. I think the best albums are ones where every track could be a potential single. Both our EP’s center around a lead track whilst showcasing a wider body of work, whereas we feel the album is lead track after lead track, with all the alternative moments captured in an accessible way.

You mentioned your EP’s showcasing a wide body of work, which in a way has opened you up to criticism; with some claiming you are yet to find your own niche. Do you feel the album refutes those claims?

The fact of the matter is that I don’t really stick to one genre when I listen to music, so I’ve always found it difficult to write music in that way. We write this music for ourselves, and the fact that it’s being accepted is really humbling. I think that this album is drenched in our identity and it’s everything that we are. It does span a lot of genres and depth, but it’s still a coherent piece of work and everything that makes our band our band, personally I would say it’s an ambitious debut record.

Has the album turned out differently to how you thought it would sound before going into the studio?

Yeah but it always does. One of the best things about the recording process is the natural way a track changes and running with that to turn it into something fresh. This recording process has been really fun, as we’ve had a lot of these songs for a while, and to record them in a completely different mindset with a completely different outlook has been really interesting.

“THE ALBUM IS A SOUNDTRACK TO OUR FORMATIVE YEARS. WE WANT PEOPLE TO CONNECT WITH IT…”

So do you still find the old songs relevant to where you are now?

I think if you’ve got a song then you’ve got a song, and if you cant dress it up in a relevant form then you’re not a very good songwriter. In a way that’s what is good about producing your own record, as you can take a standard song which has a good melody, and use it as a foundation to build a new sound around it.

You mentioned the album contains a lot of old tracks, how much of the album is new material?

There album isn’t a haberdashery of past singles and old stuff, it has been focused down into a collective piece of work. There’s tracks on there that people would have heard live, and older tracks that we’ve reworked. This album is a soundtrack to our formative years, so it would be dishonest to not put songs on there that we wrote when we were 21, as we want people to connect to it in the same way that we do.

In a debut you have got to provide a context of sorts and show where you’ve come from before you show where you’re going…

That’s a good point, and I think that’s evident with the opening track, which is a nod to facedown in this beautiful atmospheric part that George wrote. I would say the album definitely starts quite heavy before it lightens up as well.

Do you get annoyed with the constant comparisons to other bands?

We don’t really sound like anybody else, and that’s not me being facetious. To be honest I would like it if we did sound like another band, as I used to find it difficult to describe our sound to other people. We’ve never been able to fit into a genre, which is perhaps why we can’t write in one.

I would say that’s a good thing though, as once you get confined to a genre you are immediately limited in your writing style.

Yeah, and that will never happen to us, as this album is mental. Sonically it’s pretty experimental, and goes from glitchy R&B to big 80’s powerpop to mid 90’s soul, but it’s done in our way obviously.

“IF YOU PLAY GOOD MUSIC IN A ROOM IN SOUTHAMPTON OR NEW YORK CITY PEOPLE WILL RESPOND TO IT IN THE SAME WAY…”

There’s no denying there’s a lot of attention on you at the moment, but with the album not getting released until at least spring next year are you worried that the hype may die down by the time it actually comes out?

I stop myself from reading any blogs or reviews of our music as you can go mental from constantly caring what people think.  We’ve got another EP and single out early next year before the album as well so hopefully the hype shouldn’t die down too much. We’ve got a lot of stuff in the pipeline next year as well with festivals and some American dates.

With a total of three EP’s out before the album, are you worried about leaving little surprise due to leaks and whatnot?

I’d like there to be an element of surprise. I want the album to have the same impact that albums used to have on me. I’m only 23 so I’m hardly “old school”, but I remember going to HMV and buying a CD and not being able to get it online. I cant control the way people consume music nowadays, but I hope our album doesn’t leak.

You mentioned heading over to America to play next year, are you nervous about making an impact over there?

I’m looking forward to it as I just turn into Oliver Twist over there and become unnecessarily English. Everyone has this idea that America is a completely different place, but if you play good music in a room in Southampton or New York City people will respond to it in the same way, and I cant wait.

So the next year is going to be huge for you, would you say are you prepared? (If you can prepare for such a thing)

Well we’ve got a headline tour coming up in the winter with some of the dates sold out, and considering we’ve never actually headlined a gig that’s mental. The next year is definitely going to be intense, and we’re never going to have another year like it which I’m really looking forward to, it’s gonna be awesome.

The 1975 will release their second EP “Sex” on Nov 19th through Dirty Hit Records

Interview: when the gramophone rings - Nov 7th, 2012

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SNL // the sound

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“We can just afford sandwiches now, that’s about it.”

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d a m n . x