Bands to Watch #249: The 1975

Good ol’ Manchester can always be counted on to bring a great new band to our attention. Today’s topic? According to Braden, The 1975 used to go by the name The Big Sleep but changed their name to avoid any confusion with this band from New York or anyone else. Unlike most of their contemporaries from greater Manc who all seem to be running as fast as they can from the electronic ghosts of Joy Division and still soldiering on New Order, the 1975 is a band willing to take the best from what they absorbed growing up while opening their ears to urban references like TLC and ?uestlove. Further, these friends since their schooldays haven’t limited their influences to just purely musical ones; they point to fashion greats Yves Saint Laurent and Coco Chanel as inspirations, leading us to believe that either forward-thinking clothing for sale or stylish album designs are in their future, as well as philosopher Bertrand Russell and beat poet Jack Kerouac.
The 1975’s debut EP ‘Facedown’ will be released on the 6th of August on Dirty Hit Records. If the label sounds familiar to you, no doubt it should be: they’re the brains that brought us Benjamin Francis Leftwich and General Fiasco, as well as Little Comets, after Columbia stupidly dropped them. ‘The City’ is a track off ‘Facedown’; great guitars, punishing drums and the nice buzz of a synth underlie an extremely poppy melody. Expect the line “if you wanna find love, then you know where the city is” to be on everyone’s lips very soon. We here at TGTF are keeping a close eye on this quartet.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JeMcN1rXfE[/youtube]
3 Responses
11th April 2013
Hi I am a student would it be posssible to use your images of 1975 to accomapy my article.
Many thanks
Hayley Rorrison
26th April 2013
[…] sense that they would record a new video, one that looks miles different than the one we posted in my Bands to Watch feature on them in July 2012 but maintains the dramaticism that frontman Matthew Healy explained in my interview with him DC […]
29th July 2013
[…] or at least what we were presented with when we started writing about them last summer and I wrote this Bands to Watch. Time will tell if major label production will make or break […]