A split-level 1970s living room, somewhere between Abigail’s Party and The Ice Storm. Seven members of the 1975’s touring band enter the front door one by one, hang up their jackets and switch on lamps. We see that the eighth, frontman Matty Healy, was there in the dark all along when he gets up from a sofa and shakes himself awake. His suit is sharp but he looks raddled and out of sorts. He lights a cigarette, pours a glass of red wine, sits down at an upright piano and begins to sing: “You’re making an aesthetic out of not doing well/ And mining all the bits of you you think you can sell.” So begins a wonderfully strange, and estranging, experiment in what arena rock can be.
A decade on from their debut LP, the 1975 have the songs and charisma to be one of Britain’s biggest bands and enough restless, self-questioning curiosity not to be content with that. You might reasonably have assumed from the crisp brevity of their latest album, Being Funny in a Foreign Language, co-produced by the ubiquitous Jack Antonoff, that they were refocusing their ambitions after the freewheeling chaos of 2020’s Notes on a Conditional Form, but not so fast.
