If pop’s notable figures of the present time-warped themselves to, say, 1987, the UK band the 1975 would probably occupy a place similar to INXS, or Duran Duran. They craft super-catchy songs that ping-pong through pop-adjacent genres and aren’t afraid to throw in some sax skronks or vibed-out textural experiments. It’s a heady mix, and their second album, last year’s I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it, made it even more so. It front-loaded its vibed-out moments (its title track is a six-minute dreamscape, its strident bass serving as the only tether to reality) but balanced them out with exquisitely constructed pop songs that got meta-fantastic about 21st-century culture like the sumptuous “Change of Heart.” I like it when you sleep… documented a band with creative energy to spare, able to wink sardonically at selfie culture’s halls of mirrors while also being very much a part of it.
With a new album reportedly coming out sometime in 2018, the band close the book on the Sleep era with DH00278, an audio-only capture of the 1975’s December 16, 2016, show at London’s O2 Arena, one of two they played at the UK’s biggest indoor venue. (It was initially released as a concert film on Christmas 2016.) While it doesn’t entirely echo the thrill of being in the same EnormoDome as Matt Healy and his bandmates, at about two hours long and with 24 tracks, DH00278 serves as a broad, if flawed, introduction to the still-growing band and their potential. When it succeeds, it does so because of the electrified bond between the band and its audience, which gets a jolt from the casually audacious way the group brings together glam, shoegaze, synth-pop, and any other sound that might tickle its fancy—even when the 1975 fall short, their sheer nerve is worth applauding.
Live albums are now more of an oddity. Are they necessary in the age of Setlist.FM and YouTube and shortened festival sets, and don’t they mostly benefit rock acts, who seem to be out of fashion in America right now? Sure they are, if only because they provide a historical record of those bands who can keep a crowd’s attention for more than your festival-standard 45 minutes. A document of a single, two-hour show in one place, from the opening cheers through the big singles and into the long stretches of mood music—a recollection that isn’t done until the sounds of the crowd exiting as “Jungle Boogie” wafts in the background fade out—might be passé, but it does at least reveal which acts have built up stamina and magnetism.
On paper, the 1975 operate in the rock band mold—they have a guitar-vox-bass-drums core, are fronted by a larger-than-life persona in Healy, and are more than willing to super-size their sound with brass or even a choir. DH00278 shows how they’ve blown up that ideal and refashioned it for the 2010s, whether by bringing in a choir for the impish “The Sound” (sample lyric: “You’re so conceited, I said ‘I love you’/What does it matter if I lie to you?”) or hyper-charging an open-road anthem with overdriven guitars and bashed-out beats (the glorious “Milk”). It also reveals the bond the 1975 have developed with their audience, who are fervent and steadfast, tracking Healy’s cryptic social-media posts and poring over the musical and lyrical details of the band’s songs. The cheers for tracks like the hip-wriggling anti-fame broadside “Love Me” and the bad-kid-jitters anthem “Chocolate” are lusty and loud; Healy gets nearly drowned out by fans singing along multiple times. In the context of a show, ambient interludes like the swirling “Please Be Naked” is a chance for crowd and artist to bathe in feedback and glory, marveling at being in the same room together. But on DH00278, some of that electricity is lost, as the nuances offered by those tracks’ studio versions get dampened.
Not to mention those interludes are all without Healy, the swaggeringly neurotic frontman who can follow up a passionate screed against in-concert phone use (“The memory, the visceral memory of the next three and a half minutes will be better than a video on your iPhone,” he pleads before the glittery smolder “Fallingforyou”) with a request for a bit more wine, and who can passionately advocate for human rights, and who can pull off multiple welcomes to a crowd over the course of a show with brio. His charisma radiates from the speakers on a recording heard a year and change after the actual event it’s chronicling. Even if the songs weren’t as good as they are, DH00278 would still be a chance to capture the enigmatic Healy as both showmanship-minded frontman and frazzled neurotic—two sides that aren’t as different as one might think.
