the 1975

ILM got them from the start (and they’ve changed less than the general critical line on them would suggest). And they’re a group I will always associate with ILM and my sense of my taste in music and my interactions here being so inextricably intertwined that I can probably never disentangle how much of my experience is this band has been shaped by over two decades of this message board.

― Tim F, Thursday, June 2, 2022 3:20 PM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

i don't spend time on ILM anymore but i still come to this particular thread whenever 1975 drops an album/single/promo biz. i post very infrequently but always come back and read because this board does so thoroughly understand the exact things i love about this band. like, these are literally my exact thoughts on their critical reputation:

the critical response to ABIIOR seemed to largely be a belated realisation that actually ILIWYS was worth taking seriously and shouldn't have just been rejected out of hand because the debut made them seem like a shallow obnoxious pop band (not true but i do understand how that was an easy surface-level takeaway) + they were being 'topical' with stuff like "love it if we made it" which helped get more on board

― ufo, Wednesday, June 1, 2022 8:14 PM (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

i'm still consistently surprised with how few people i'm around (late 20s - early 40s) have even *heard* of them, even adventurous music listeners / people who listen to a lot of pop music. can't wait to see them in concert again, i hope even when they tour this new album they fill the set with a lot of NOACF stuff. feels like a long shot but i have a fantasy of getting the fuck down with an arena full of people to "Having No Head".

i'm listening to the beabadoobee EP as i write this. bye ~

they're definitely a big cult fanbase act rather than really having much of a mainstream presence and their relationship with the indie rock press etc. has been mixed so it's not that surprising to me

To what extent is Dirty Hit to blame for their relative obscurity? Wolf Alice and Rina Sawayama also seem to be underappreciated by the mainstream, though the latter could have her breakout this year.

they're not a major label and both wolf alice and especially the 1975 have done very well for themselves given that

I thought you were saying the 1975 is a big cult act, but I do love the idea of the 1975 as a cult act, because they fill arenas here, which puts them in the rarified company of, what, pre-breakthrough Metallica and the Cure, cult acts (in the US) that filled arenas? That doesn't happen that often, or not so much anymore. It's like the radio or TV/movies or however labels and bands get music out just hasn't figured out what to do with them, or where to put them, but (with some hyperbole) almost everyone that hears them becomes a fan. Think I mentioned bringing my buddy, who is 53, to the last 1975 show. He'd never even heard of them but had a blast and still talks about it.

xp right - didn't necessarily mean to suggest that Dirty Hit isn't good at PR for their size but just that the decision for these acts to be on an indie label is likely going to limit their exposure on radio, etc.

they're on (or were) on Interscope over in North America

yeah they’re on interscope in the US. and wolf alice is signed to RCA in the US now.

we intuitively know that contemporary rock bands in general don’t have anywhere near the cultural penetration of pop, rap, and R&B acts so you obv have to take that into account as a huge mitigating factor in parsing out their popularity. glass animals had a no 1 hit this year & i think you’d be hard pressed to find tons of people in america who know who they are.

and then when you break that down even further into which british rock bands haven broken thru in america since 2000 the number is extremely small. the arctic monkeys got pretty big in the US… you could put coldplay in there if you consider them rock (i wouldn’t). franz ferdinand perhaps. but it’s a really small group. if you cut it down to bands that debuted after 2010 the 1975 are the only ones i can think of who have broken thru in the US at all. chvrches might be the other?

they’ve also had a no 1 album, and two other top 5 albums in the US. if you look at the numbers for their singles on the rock charts they’ve actually (quietly) become a pretty consistent force w/in the little niche that is mainstream rock music. they have 7 top 10 hits on the “hot rock songs” chart incl two from the last album

anecdotally speaking i think younger millennials/older gen z are pretty aware of who they are even if they remain a bit divisive

what they haven't cracked over here is the funko collector prestige crowd that makes its aesthetic around like ... tyler, lana, frank, these kinds of tasteful "Real Music", doesn't stream as much as you'd think but sells a shitton of vinyl and concert tickets (this is a general tendency of this world doesn't describe literally every act), may no longer even get good reviews but was once a critical darling etc. Basically, the early 20something rejecting his teen tastes crowd does not like them because they are the teen tastes and the poptimist reversal

all the things that make them great to ILM ... like a rock version of diddy dirty money

anecdotally speaking i think younger millennials/older gen z are pretty aware of who they are even if they remain a bit divisive

― J0rdan S., Thursday, June 23, 2022 10:39 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Probably right. The crowd at the show I went to was almost uniformly 18-25-year-olds.

i've seen them twice and both times i've felt like the chaperone (mind you, that's what it feels like at most bigger shows now) (i'm 35)

Us oldies felt like aliens at the last show.

I like a few of their songs, and find a few a bit too much for my tastes. I can see how their fans/stans could be seen as annoying, but I’m not in that age demographic so I think, let the kids enjoy their music. Most people that I know who know of them feel about the same— tbh I always just hated their name and never gave them a chance until a year or two ago.

I am 37, fwiw

Basically, the early 20something rejecting his teen tastes crowd does not like them because they are the teen tastes and the poptimist reversal

all the things that make them great to ILM ... like a rock version of diddy dirty money

― xheugy eddy (D-40), Thursday, June 23, 2022 1:16 PM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

:~{

I don’t disagree with any of that I just felt kind of old reading it

I agree with deej

what they haven't cracked over here is the funko collector prestige crowd that makes its aesthetic around like ... tyler, lana, frank, these kinds of tasteful "Real Music", doesn't stream as much as you'd think but sells a shitton of vinyl and concert tickets (this is a general tendency of this world doesn't describe literally every act), may no longer even get good reviews but was once a critical darling etc. Basically, the early 20something rejecting his teen tastes crowd does not like them because they are the teen tastes and the poptimist reversal

all the things that make them great to ILM ... like a rock version of diddy dirty money

― xheugy eddy (D-40), Thursday, 23 June 2022 17:16 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

One attraction of any amorphous category of "real music" is the encoded address from the product to the listener, "I am worthy of being taken seriously, and you demonstrate your worth by doing so" - this is an exchange between product and consumer which is quite separate to traditional ideas of "authenticity" though they can be conflated or blurred at times (which is why Lana Del Rey can be "real music" notwithstanding her highlighting her own artifice, but also why her status as such will always be more contested than say frank ocean).

The 1975 don't project that kind of message at all.

I probably addressed this above in part:

To my mind, one difference between Yorke (circa OK Computer) and Healy is that, while Yorke probably would have told people he was full of shit if asked, he always performed/performs the songs very seriously. Matt meanwhile has almost constructed a performative persona around being in on the joke, kind of “don’t believe anything you hear, and least of all this”. It really struck me when I saw a TV show performance of “The Sound” a few years back and Matt sang the song like he was doing a karaoke performance of someone else’s tune, which, conceptually he kind of was? And that is very present at the songwriting level - for example, I cannot think of a band or artist who has written more songs structured as conversations between unreliable narrators.

Considered objectively, this should perhaps make Matt less of a fraud than Thom (though the entire question of “is this fraudulent” is dumb and unhelpful in any event), but I think a lot of people hear Matt’s coded “I am full of shit” messaging and mistake it for something they have worked out for themselves, congratulating themselves for perceiving a kind of fakeness/shallowness to the pseudo-profundity as if that wasn’t precisely the vibe that Matt had been seeking to convey.

― Tim F, Thursday, 20 February 2020 21:36 (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

I agree with that— I think that sometimes that vibe is something I seek in music, and sometimes it isn’t. The ‘artifice’ of “The Sound” in particular is what sold me initially— it felt reflexive rather than smirking.

Very well put, 2020 Tim

https://www.instagram.com/p/CfWqEhTMdWO/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

instant classic incoming?

what they haven't cracked over here is the funko collector prestige crowd that makes its aesthetic around like ... tyler, lana, frank, these kinds of tasteful "Real Music", doesn't stream as much as you'd think but sells a shitton of vinyl and concert tickets

mostly agreed here, but they were headlining arenas when they last did a u.s. run in 2019, so they probably sell pretty well.

yeah, not calling anyone wrong or right, and obviously there are still levels for this band to obtain, but calling them relatively obscure doesn't really track, i don't think. if they can play basketball arenas in midsized American towns, they're doing pretty good!

🎵 she was part of the airforce // i was part of the band // i always used to bust into her hand 🎵

Don’t be a leaker, Kevin

https://www.instagram.com/tv/CfXRQYIs6nP/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

another neo-soul type song?

these lyrics…. never change matty healy

I have a weird feeling that IG snippet is a misdirect

i’ve heard the new music is “pop” but given their nature i ultimately don’t really know what that means

11 tracks!!! being funny in a foreign language!!!

preposterous album title that fits right in with the last three preposterous albums titles

i thought they'd teased that as a song title years ago but i checked and it might have been a working title for "bagsy not in net"?

weird that they're putting out a normal-sized album

I'd be disappointed if the album titles weren't ridiculous.

To my mind, one difference between Yorke (circa OK Computer) and Healy is that, while Yorke probably would have told people he was full of shit if asked, he always performed/performs the songs very seriously. Matt meanwhile has almost constructed a performative persona around being in on the joke, kind of “don’t believe anything you hear, and least of all this”. It really struck me when I saw a TV show performance of “The Sound” a few years back and Matt sang the song like he was doing a karaoke performance of someone else’s tune, which, conceptually he kind of was? And that is very present at the songwriting level - for example, I cannot think of a band or artist who has written more songs structured as conversations between unreliable narrators.

Considered objectively, this should perhaps make Matt less of a fraud than Thom (though the entire question of “is this fraudulent” is dumb and unhelpful in any event), but I think a lot of people hear Matt’s coded “I am full of shit” messaging and mistake it for something they have worked out for themselves, congratulating themselves for perceiving a kind of fakeness/shallowness to the pseudo-profundity as if that wasn’t precisely the vibe that Matt had been seeking to convey.

― Tim F, Thursday, 20 February 2020

otm. I'd add: "ILMers hear the irony and distance, the 18-to-25 y/olds I know hear a shambolic goofball having fun."

being good at both of those does sum up healy's appeal

Faintly hoping that one of these songs is like 20 minutes long

i have no idea if 11 tracks w/ no experiments/filler (i say filler with love) would be a good thing or a bad thing.

i used to want that from them, but now i feel like 19 tracks w/ filler is part of the charm.

yeah unlike everyone else on earth i was looking forward to a double album

just speculation but i hope j0rd is right about the neo-soul vibe he got from the sample

i too have come to love the absurd length of their albums but they've always talked about how the first four albums are part of one "era" and i'm excited to see all the ways they might be moving in a new direction, concision included. the track titles seem to imply some greater degree of simplicity/straightforwardness which, along with the concise tracklist, could be part of what they mean by "pop" (a more digestible package, fewer experimental detours)

they've done the wild expansive 80-minute album twice now so i'm fine with them putting out something more focused as a change of pace

the debut's songtitles were mostly one word and it was incredibly annoying

I also would like to see what they do with a tightly focused album, as much as I loved the last one

what if half of those 11 tracks are long instrumental interludes

In a perhaps similar vein, I would be happy with this being their “focused” “pop” album if that means it is their Hats.

In a perhaps similar vein, I would be happy with this being their “focused” “pop” album if that means it is their Hats.

― Tim F

this would be a dream come true.

he's occasionally used hats as a reference point for wanting to make a more concise album someday

the sophistipop illmatic

album out Oct. 14

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87nG3LuabUs

doesn’t premiere for another 22 hours but posting this here anyway

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9EBhaULToU

22 hours???? but i want it nowwwww