The 1975 – The 1975 Review

In attempting to understand The 1975 as a band, we must first understand their audience. After listening to their self-titled debut, I’ve come to the conclusion that fans of The 1975 don’t know all that much about music. Chart-topping dribblers who wouldn’t know a good indie album even if a vinyl of O.K. Computer or Oracular Spectacular was flung like a Frisbee towards them. A lack of connection to good music is integral to enjoying The 1975, a debut album that rattles through a checklist of bearable tropes, turning them into clumsy, weak anecdotes.

Still, it’s a rather bold move to make all of your songs sound identical to one another. There’s little difference between the plucky, upbeat rhythm of Chocolate sounding absolutely identical to that of Girls. There’s no difference aside from the crooning, grating vocals from Matt Healy. They have the look of an indie band, with the shaved sides, slicked-back hair, cool leather jackets and music videos set in rooms plastered with posters of Marilyn Monroe and Michael Jackson, but their sound is closer to generic pandering than anywhere close to a note of interest.

Perhaps people are attached to the look, rather than the sound. I struggle to grasp with the belief that anybody would actually like the sound output from the band. Most of the people I’ve spoken to praise or punish Healy for his various antics, without really saying anything about how his music sounds. He’s a modern-day Gallagher brother, devoid of musical interest but a larger than life personality keeps his out-of-their-depth band above water as they limp from album to album. He leaps from song to song with relatively bland moments little talent comes from the songwriting. Writing often of love is acceptable, so long as the writing is good. Lyrics are certainly not the strong suit of this album, and more often than not we’re left with a lukewarm blend of synthpop and new wave aspects. The blend should be interesting, but the vast imperfection of the lyrics drag the album away from the potential to formulate a passable record.

A debut is often where an artist can present the various sounds and beats they can provide. The platform to showcase variety, interesting new elements that can be built upon the foundation of a genre. The 1975 does nothing of the sort, with each song a repetitive, cataclysmic snooze-fest that rattle on about the generic and expected hits of indie music. Drugs, drink, sex and more drugs were touched upon twenty years ago, and done an infinite amount of times better than this embarrassingly jaunty sixteen song behemoth. There are about four topics worth of material spread out over an hour, not one of them handled with interest or an engaging enough spin on old ideas.

No, this isn’t a review of the band, but of their debut album. I feel like most of the criticisms and problems I have with this first album could be applied to the band as a whole though. Shallow, bland and repetitive lyrics that are devoid of meaning or engaging wordplay. A band people will hail as indie, cool or great, but those people are idiots. An album filled with half-baked concepts, weak lyrics and the same few chords that surface-level independent music fans will latch onto with relative ease. An album where its singles are as bad as the tracks tucked away within the blanket of emotionless quavering becoming a rather annoying staple of a wannabe indie car-crash. Weak at the best of times, awful at the worst of it.