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The 1975 VibeZ

Twenty-one tracks from the most divisive British band of their generation — and the one most likely to be taken seriously in twenty years.

The 1975 time-warp into Phoenix on April 15.

The 1975

The 1975 are four men from Manchester who have been playing together since school, and who arrived looking like a straightforward pop-rock band before revealing themselves to be something considerably odder: a group whose albums include ambient interludes, gospel choirs, saxophone solos, spoken-word essays and an environmental address delivered by Greta Thunberg.

The polarisation is the point. Matty Healy writes lyrics that are self-aware to the edge of self-sabotage, and the band's production — mostly by drummer George Daniel with Healy — is deliberately maximalist, drawing on eighties pop, ambient music, Britpop and contemporary R&B within a single album.

What survives the arguments is the songwriting. Underneath the conceptual apparatus there are a great many extremely well-built pop songs.

What to listen for

"Somebody Else" is the best thing they have made — a slow, synth-led record about jealousy that is more emotionally precise than anything else in their catalogue.

"Love It If We Made It" is the ambitious one: a list of headlines shouted over a Peter Gabriel-shaped arrangement, and it earns its bombast.

"TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME" is the pop single that shows how well they absorb contemporary production, and "Frail State Of Mind" is the one that borrows most openly from UK garage.

"The Man Who Married A Robot / Love Theme" is the strangest thing here — a story read by a text-to-speech voice over strings — and whether it works is genuinely a matter of taste.

"Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America" is the quiet acoustic one and the best-written lyric on the list.

"Playing On My Mind", "Guys" and "By Your Side" are the warm late-period material, and the instrumental tracks each titled "The 1975" are the recurring album-opening motif.

Go deeper

I Like It When You Sleep... (2016) is the album where the ambition and the songs are best balanced. A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships (2018) is the most interesting and the most uneven.

For the lineage — British bands that treat pop production as a compositional tool rather than a compromise — go back to Talk Talk, Prefab Sprout and Tears for Fears.

How to approach them: they are an album band, and shuffling them is the fastest way to conclude they are insufferable. The interludes, the spoken pieces and the ambient passages exist to set up the songs around them, and heard in sequence the self-consciousness reads as structure rather than as posturing.

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