Artist

The 1975

Wilmslow, United Kingdom · Formed 2002

The 1975 is a music group from Wilmslow, United Kingdom, active since 2002. Their discography on Gatefold includes 13 records.

Start your shelf →Open in app

Albums tracked

155

In collections

2002

Since

Biography

Mike Crossey met them in a room where they were trying to be a guitar band, but George Daniel was already obsessed with the syncopation of garage and house music. Most people think they started with that self-titled record in 2013, but the blueprint was all over those four EPs they dropped in eighteen months. They were kids from Manchester who had been playing together since 2002, trying to find a way to make 80s pop production feel as raw as a basement show. Matty Healy doesn't have a filter, which is why the records are bloated, brilliant, and occasionally exhausting. By the time they got to the second album, they were doubling down on INXS grooves and shoegaze textures while keeping the lyrics strictly about narcissism and chemical dependency. It’s a messy catalog because it’s a high-stakes one; they’d rather fail at being a maximalist art project than succeed at being a boring rock band.

Bio from The Clerk

The Arc of The 1975

The pivots — what forced The 1975 to reinvent.

The Crossey Years
They spent a decade as a high school band before Mike Crossey helped them distill a decade of scrapped demos into the first two records. This era was defined by a hyper-compressed, '80s-indebted pop sound that relied on Hann’s palm-muted guitars and Daniel’s obsession with precise, digital percussion. You hear it in the way 'Chocolate' and 'Love Me' sound like they were polished with sandpaper—bright, sharp, and surgically clean.
The Digital Maximalist Shift
A Brief Inquiry saw the band pivoting away from the tight indie-pop structure to mirror the fragmented chaos of the internet. They started self-producing more heavily, dragging in Auto-Tune, acoustic folk, and orchestral arrangements while Healy leaned into a persona that was part-prophet and part-disaster. The result was a sprawl that made 'Notes on a Conditional Form' a 22-track monster of UK garage beats and ambient noise that almost broke the band's internal logic.
The Real World Realignment
For 'Being Funny in a Foreign Language', they finally let an outsider in and hired Jack Antonoff to strip away the digital clutter. They tracked much of it live at Electric Lady, moving away from the laptop-heavy production of the previous five years toward something with actual breath in the room. It’s the first time they sounded like the four guys who had been playing together since they were teenagers, trading the glitchy textures for organic piano and a tighter, more disciplined rhythm section.

Influences

The Blue Nile — Healy has cited 'Hats' as the primary inspiration for their ambient-pop DNA. You hear the direct lineage in 'Love It If We Made It' and the way they use synthesizers to create a sense of nocturnal, urban isolation.
INXS — The band has frequently pointed to the rhythmic tightness of the 'Kick' era as their guitar gospel. The palm-muted, percussive guitar scratch on 'She's American' is a total rip of Andrew Farriss’s signature style.
Peter Gabriel — They’ve openly referenced Gabriel’s 'So' as the benchmark for high-concept pop production. The gated reverb and the world-music-meets-digital-pop textures on 'Settle Down' are straight out of Gabriel’s 1986 playbook.
My Bloody Valentine — Before they were a pop band, they were obsessed with Kevin Shields, which is documented in their early EP tracks like 'Lostmyhead'. You can hear the 'Loveless' influence in the thick, modulated wall of sound they use to bury their more melodic hooks.
Talking Heads — The band toured with David Byrne’s 'American Utopia' philosophy in mind and borrowed his nervous, staccato vocal delivery for 'Give Yourself a Try'. The influence is in the art-school cynicism and the way they lock into a repetitive, neurotic groove.