The 1975’s new sophomore album I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It marked the second time the group had reached number one on the album chart in their home country of the United Kingdom. It also became the group’s first number one album in the United States upon its late-February release.
But singer/guitarist Matt Healy said his feelings about the achievement were very different from what he felt when the group’s self-titled debut reached number on in the United Kingdom upon its release in September 2013.
“At the time, I didn’t realize it, but now I realize the desire for that [first] album to do so well was definitely imbued with my desire to be known and have people know who I am,” he said.
“On this [second] record, I had to get myself to a place where I really didn’t care,” Healy said. “I had to get to a place where I was doing it because I just loved doing it [the music] and I wasn’t scared of what people were going to say and I wasn’t scared of what people were going to think … It was a different experience because it was about the album. It wasn’t my ego. It wasn’t about me. It was about this thing that I’d made doing so well.”
That sort of sense of satisfaction is something Healy said he always felt he would one day get to experience. But the group had its share of disappointments in the decade after Healy, drummer George Daniel, guitarist Adam Hann and bassist Ross MacDonald—all students at Wilmslow High School in Wilmslow, a town in Cheshire, England—formed the group.
“We were 13 when we started this band,” Healy said. “We grew up together, and we fucked up together and all of our social groups were based around the band. We were a band, like a band of people, like bound together. And that stands for something.”
The group also had musical growing to do, and Healy admits the band’s influences were too obvious in its early music and it took time to find a musical identity, which is based in creating a pop sound that blends an array of styles, including electronica, ’80s-ish synth-pop, soul and funk.
“That’s what defines our music, the fact that we literally don’t care about stuff like genres and these kind of things,” he said.
The 1975 started to find its voice over four EPs released between 2012 and spring 2013 that spawned a pair of U.K. hit singles, “Sex” and “Chocolate,” and that helped set the stage for the emphatic debut of the self-titled album in that country.
The way The 1975 blends an array of styles into its songs has indeed become its defining signature. I Like It When You Sleep especially sounds like the work of a band that was bursting with musical ideas and decided to pack as many styles, sounds and ideas into the songs as possible. Rock, pop, electronica, ’80s-ish synth-pop and funk all figure into the mix.
The band will showcase songs from I Like It When You Sleep heavily on this tour. Interestingly, however, Healy said that on this tour the band plans to feature its four EPs more than their self-titled album in the rest of its set.
“My heart lies a lot in the EPs, and it’s not to take anything away from the first album,” Healy said. “I think after two years of touring that [first] album … we never really toured them [the EPs] the way we did the first album. Now, our shows are about engaging and it being real and it being live, and I suppose that I really believe in this set. So even if you come to the show and you don’t know as many songs as you would do if it was just [featuring] the first album, it’s still a more believable show.”
The 1975 headline the Rave on Tuesday, May 24 at 8 p.m. with Wolf Alice and The Japanese House.
