“It’s just a self-referential way that stops you having to be human.”Īt first, the band worked mostly within the parameters of pop rock, writing big-tent anthems that drew heavily on eighties synth-pop, filled with kick drums and clever hooks-a default mode for plenty of mainstream musicians who can’t rap convincingly. “You lack substance when you say something like ‘Oh what a shame,’ ” he sings, on “Sincerity Is Scary,” from 2018. He could harshly critique the preferences and habits of an entire generation while implicating himself in the same breath. The band’s first three albums showed an impressive ability to metabolize musical styles and eras, but even more dazzling was the attitudinal tap dance that Healy performed in his lyrics. (Healy has described himself, a bit sheepishly, as “a millennial that baby boomers like.”) The 1975 functions as a vessel for his ponderings about the psychic burdens of millennials, and the self-loathing he feels for even bothering to talk about them. Scrawny and outspoken, with a thicket of wild black hair and a love of eyeliner, illicit substances, and shirtlessness, he’s become an avatar of modern authenticity, wit, and flamboyance-someone unfiltered and agile enough to spar with Maroon 5 on a public platform. Rock music has all but disappeared from pop culture, but the mythology of the rock star looms large, and Healy embodies the archetype. The 1975 has four members, but its front man, a charismatic thirty-one-year-old named Matty Healy, assumes the responsibility of addressing these questions-and then he asks more. The group was formed, in the early two-thousands, as a teen-age punk cover band but has morphed into a genre-defying shape that poses a series of questions: Where does nostalgia end and innovation begin? What counts as rock and roll, and why should anyone care? What’s the difference between ambition and self-indulgence? Is self-awareness an asset or a cross to bear? No mainstream act has embraced this freedom more wholeheartedly than the 1975, a group from Britain that could loosely be classified as a band, if only because its members sometimes play instruments. Technology has eroded boundaries of taste and influence, cracking open a trove of stylistic opportunity. Pop music, once ruled by constraint and conformity, now faces a tyranny of freedom.

The 1975 deluxe drqw