the 1975

Not everyone's convinced that's the title:

https://www.reddit.com/r/the1975/comments/ssgumy/he_changed_his_bio_the_problem_attic_is_totally/

to be fair this band has never had anything even resembling a good album title

if they actually named it that it would be the beginning of their flop era. earlier album titles aren't so basic x cringe as that

are their social media hiatuses usually this long, i thought they're usually only for like 24 hours

ok you guys can come back now

Nothing?

I’ve decided that today is the day that they must release new music

what if this is their way of announcing their breakup and all that footage of them in the studio is from years ago

THEY’RE BACK LFGGGGG

took them long enough

oh single isn't until 7 july boooo long build-ups to singles are the worst

i think word is the album is expected in october?

but I want it now

my boys <3

Your new album. Your new era. Your old friends.
The 1975https://t.co/Tk3FMU5HLb pic.twitter.com/hY5kCLK2e5

— The 1975 (@the1975) June 1, 2022

this is where im at these days

i think that "i think there's something you should know" might be the best song they've ever done

― ufo, Thursday, August 20, 2020 3:39 AM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

huh

i listened to NOACF a few times last week and it’s just an astonishing album, bowls me over every single time

the trajectory of critical opinion on them is so weird. mass skepticism and/or ambivalence thru the first two albums that finally flips the other way right as they make their worst and kinda most openly troll-y album (thinking of “love it if we made it,” “tootime,” the robot song). then they’re dropped into “yeah we don’t really care about these guys anymore, been there done that” post-overexposure purgatory — overexposure driven by the same editors writers etc who previously ignored them — right as they make easily one of the best pop albums of the last 10 years

completely agree

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

NOACF backlash was fairly understandable since it was such a long, messy and fairly unapproachable album - i love it but even i think the sequencing is a disaster so i can understand why people who only just got on board were put off.

but i'd put ABIIOR above the debut still & wouldn't say it's "troll-y"? idk

they're teasing that the first single is "being funny in a foreign language"

What about if you think, "Except for the first album, they've always recorded uneven albums and I wish we lived in an era when greatest hits still sold?"?

part of the problem!

I like the (mild) unevenness. It's a feature, not a bug.

I agree.

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.

<3 tim <3

they uploaded all their albums to apple music in dolby atmos (apple's highest quality audio). i had fun bopping around the albums listening to some of the songs, the productions do sound richer

The 1975 - Part Of The Band. 7 Julyhttps://t.co/tmjlHBzB3r pic.twitter.com/5YvJQ6KSgI

— The 1975 (@the1975) June 13, 2022

that middle stretch on NOACF, jesus

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.