Cover Feature Turn On. Tune In. Drop Out: The 1975

It’s Friday 20th September and, across the world, hundreds of thousands of people are uniting in a global protest against the current climate emergency. The latest action stemming from the School Strike for Climate movement, led by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, it’s a huge, positive coming together of humanity - an exercise in the power of community and the best kind of resistance. Standing among it all feels weighty; it feels like something is happening.

In Melbourne, The 1975 are at the end of a six-month, near-constant run of gigs that’s seen them traverse the globe, packing out venues at every stop. Later that night, they’ll headline the city’s Margaret Court Arena to near-hysterical screams; the show is long-since sold out, as is every show they play these days. But more than just inciting pop star mania, there’s been a shift over the last 12 months in what the band have come to represent. It’s no more evident than among the mobilised masses in Treasury Gardens earlier that afternoon. “I stood at that protest for an hour and I saw, in Melbourne, where I’m not from, ten 1975 signs and fifty 1975 shirts and it was almost like it’s all part of [the same thing],” says frontman Matty Healy the next day. “It feels like a moment in youth culture. You know that time? Remember ‘that time’? It feels like one of them. I’ve got a real ‘that time’ feeling about this, with the climate strikes and Greta getting so insanely influential on a global scale and that song [the band’s recent self-titled single, featuring an impassioned speech by the young activist] being adopted by Greenpeace. I don’t feel like I have control over it; it’s got this life of its own and people are adopting it. It feels like it’s bigger than me, way bigger.”

There’s the tangible sense that, if this moment in history is one of ‘those times’, the ones that get remembered, then The 1975 are the band soundtracking it the most acutely. The gears audibly shifted with the release of the cut-and-paste, socio-political panic attack of ‘Love It If We Made It’ last year, a song so undeniably on-the-money that even former detractors Pitchfork named it their Track of the Year (“Dude, if I was 23 and I’d got Pitchfork Track of the Year, I would have turned into a dickhead, so it’s good that it rolls off me now…” the singer snorts). Since then, a catalogue of seemingly-endless bullet points have taken the band ever-further into unchartered waters. There’s the career bookmarks, from Number One albums to this summer’s Reading & Leeds Festival headline, and gushing accolades - Ivor Novello’s Songwriters of the Year; the BRITs’ Best British Group and Best Album etc etc - so many, in fact, that ‘Nominations and awards received by The 1975’ requires its own Wikipedia page.