the 1975

the band i was so fanatically into at various points in my adolescence

diary fragment / 1:53 am / frail

we were arguing. again. i don’t even remember what about. maybe the gap year, maybe the tone, maybe the fact that i exist too loudly for her sanity? i wanted to scream something biblical into her face. like really SCREAM. split-lip, vein-throbbing, ungodly scream. something primal and guttural and final. like, YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU’VE DONE TO ME. but i didn’t. i just ran upstairs and slammed the door like a fucking cliché. i collapsed on the floor, because the bed felt too unreachably dramatic and the chair felt too sane. i scratched at my skin, thinking maybe if i rubbed hard enough, i could scrub away whatever ancient grief lived there. sin. memory. matrilineal rot. everything that itches when you don’t know who to blame. like maybe i could claw out that woman—the whole operatic tragedy of her. the woman who birthed me and never let me forget it. the woman who has no sense of purpose herself but expects me to run like my head’s on fire. towards what????? she yells like a banshee, slams cabinet doors, and then--then—she tries to kiss me. right on the forehead. right after calling me eccentric. what kind of lunatic spits poison then wants to hold your face like a newborn? what kind of love is that??? i wanted to scream it into her mouth, wedge my throat down hers just to make her feel what it’s like to be swallowed whole every damn day. but i didn’t. i ran. like the fucking cliché i am. slammed the door so hard the windows rattled, laid down on the floor like a dying animal, forehead to the tile like prayer, thinking maybe the ground would understand me better than she ever did. and then i did what i always do when i’m on the edge of some adolescent collapse: i played frail state of mind by the 1975. because of course i did. because i’m nothing if not predictable. because what else is there to do when you can’t yell and you can’t cry your heart out and your hands are shaking and your mom thinks you’re just lazy but really you’re thinking about running away and locking yourself in a motel room and screaming until you go hoarse, about becoming someone else, just so she can never find you and ask you what you want for dinner like she didn’t just ruin your entire sense of self again??? i needed matty’s voice to scream for me. i needed someone else to say “I HATE IT HERE” so i didn’t have to. i scratched at my skin until it stung. until it felt like i could dig through skin and bone and guilt and find some version of myself that wasn’t so angry all the time. and i lay there, on the floor, rubbing my forehead raw, trying to erase all the sins she passed down to me in utero. thinking maybe if i scraped hard enough, i could claw the mother out of the girl.

---

matty once said “if i’m lost, how can i find myself?” and i was like—okay why the fuck is this british man in my brain?!?!

“caught up in fashion / karcrashian panache / a bag of bash for passion.”
“hyper politicised sexual trysts / i think my boyfriend’s a nihilist.”
who even writes like that???

matty healy, apparently.

i still dream about glastonbury. matty’s body curled on the floor, gasping like his lungs were too small for what he was trying to feel, breath ragged like he’d run himself into the earth. it particularly should have been a tragedy to watch, but somehow it was the most beautiful thing i’d ever seen. my chest hurt. i wanted to shake him, to thank him, to scream at him for being so reckless, and at the same time i thought, god, this is the coolest thing i’ve ever witnessed. it feels wrong, right? to admire the way someone unravels. but loving the 1975 has always been about contradictions.

i don’t think i’ve ever had as tempestuous a relationship with a band in my life as i have with the 1975. i don’t even know when i explicitly started listening to them. i just remember that one day, i was in my room, probably crying about something stupid, and i played somebody else on repeat until it stopped being music and just became background noise for whatever i was feeling. having had a rough time during my teenage years, i feel like i missed out on a lot of quintessential teenage experiences. i never fully got to relish my teenage years, but i did have the 1975 as the soundtrack to them.

i remember hearing robbers for the first time and not understanding a single thing but still crying. i didn’t really understand what it meant. it sounded so vague, almost like glittery drowning. like the kind of night you don’t remember but keep dreaming about. it sounded like being underwater in a neon-lit swimming pool. i hadn’t kissed anyone, hadn’t done anything reckless. i hadn’t lived the song. but it still felt like evocation. that’s what scared me. like something i’d missed. i think i’ve been grieving girlhood since before it ended. i heard it again years later, and i think i wept in the bathroom. the feeling of screaming “she had a face straight outta magazine” into the mirror is the same feeling as being sixteen and foolish enough to think life might still be cinematic. it’s the feeling of knowing nothing’s waiting for you, but convincing yourself that something is.

matty healy once said, “this one’s for 16-year-old you,” before playing robbers, and i think i must’ve gasped. the ache in my chest must’ve become so retroactive. like i was grieving the adolescence i didn’t know i was allowed to feel. that moment, like the entire band, was a kind of fraudulent sincerity. because 16-year-old me was nowhere and everywhere. all she had were lyrics she didn’t yet understand. lyrics like bite marks.

that song is what it would’ve sounded like to be infinite, if i had ever been given the chance. it’s the apocalyptic joy of being young in a major key, of not knowing what's next but feeling like whatever it is— it’s yours. that was my rebellion. it never came in actions but in sound. and now, i scream along to “robbers” like it’s a memory i never had but deeply deserve.

and then there was i like america & america likes me. i didn’t even like the song the first time i heard it. it was auto-tuned and frantic and weird. it’s so drenched in auto-tune it barely sounds human. it’s all fear of death and mass shootings and nothing really changes. but then i read about that art piece, the one with the coyote. and suddenly the panic in his voice made sense. he was afraid of dying. and i was too. it’s meant to sound like algorithmic death, a synthetic scream. that was intentional. they were also my first introduction to joseph beuys. to philosophy as performance. the title references beuys’ performance piece where he lived in a gallery with a coyote to comment on america’s savagery. matty, for what it’s worth, probably wouldn’t survive three hours with a coyote. but i also don’t think he’d try. he’d write a song about it, and it would bang.

and it’s so stupid— how a song can feel like an adult friend who’s always there for you. how his voice, drugged and breaking, made me feel like someone else knew what it was like to not know how to talk. to be full of thoughts that taste like the burnt skin of a match. to feel like your body is a room you don’t want to live in anymore. in the eyes of 16-year-old me, that was all that mattered; they were my little secret band and they were different.

and matty. of course, matty.

he was everything i loathed and everything i wanted to be. a disaster with a philosophy minor. a catholic mystic disguised as a cokehead. i saw him in ginsberg, in kerouac, in every man who ever wrote a book like a fever. he never tells me it’ll be okay. that’s what i love about him.
he just says, yeah, this sucks, and i’m still here too.

and when he says, “i quote on the road like a twat” in “a change of heart,” it’s not irony— it’s inheritance. i remember hearing him say that, and rolling my eyes. then buying on the road the next week. i didn’t even like it. but i read it because he blabbered about it. i googled it anyway. dog-eared it. it was greasy and restless and womanless. and then i read kerouac again, and ginsberg, and burroughs, and suddenly the six gallery reading in 1955 was as much a part of my teenage lore as my first academic failure. i wrote “mad to live” in the back of my school notebook like a loser. hated it. kept reading it. it made me feel sick and alive and outside of everything.

if anything, it widened the rabbit hole. i chased ginsberg, burroughs, corso. and i realised that, what they stood for— alienation, movement, madness, beauty— was what i had been trying to name inside myself. and when i found out that kerouac didn’t even consider himself “beat” but instead a “strange solitary crazy catholic mystic,” i recognized the energy. that was matty. too earnest to be ironic, too self-aware to be tolerable. a man who’d never write what he does if he didn’t live a sort of emotional monasticism in his brain 24/7. it makes sense now. that odd, aggressive intimacy. the unshakable guilt. the monastic rhythm of someone who has too many thoughts and not enough ways to silence them. the 1975 became the weird little pocket in the culture where i didn’t have to pick between being intellectual and emotional. they were everything at once: philosophy majors with a drug addiction, pop stars quoting foucault and crying on stage.

and that’s how it all started.
the rabbit hole.
joseph beuys.
allen ginsberg.
gender theory.
consumerism.
lil peep.
drag queens.
jesus.

matty made me want to read ginsberg. and ginsberg made me want to scream.

“i saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night..”

¹ this is about drug addiction (fix = heroin) and the predawn desperation of searching for it.

• the phrase “negro streets” is not an insult. it’s a factual descriptor of where ginsberg’s contemporaries often found themselves (in urban black neighborhoods), partly because those were the places where certain subcultures, jazz, and drugs intersected in the 1940s–50s.

• “angry fix” suggests a craving not just for the drug, but for something urgent, violent, and consuming; a confrontation with life itself.

it grabbed me by the throat. i thought, yes. that’s what this band sounds like. a man with too many ideas and no one to make him dinner. a boy trying to explain god with a cigarette and a synthesizer. i wrote that on my hands and in the back of my notebooks like it was a prayer. i so wanted someone to ask me about it. no one ever did.

they taught me to name things i didn’t yet understand. modernity. nihilism. melancholy. toxic masculinity. the poetry of riots. “hyper-politicized sexual trysts”—what does that even mean? i didn’t know, but i annotated it.

what the 1975 did was ruin me for other music. their songs were about love, sure, yes— but the kind of love that tastes like battery acid and hotel soap. love as addiction. love as performance. love as post-irony. it was embarrassing, and beautiful. i didn’t know music could do that— could ask questions instead of offering relief. could be ugly, and self-aware, and still worthy of being screamed from the back row. people say their lyrics age like milk. maybe. but sometimes milk becomes cheese. and i’d rather rot interestingly than be shelf-stable. i’d rather curdle into something pungent, alive, and impossible to ignore than sit forever in some sterile, shelf-stable coffin of a can.

i hated that i loved them. still kind of do. especially when matty starts being political in interviews or writing lyrics that sound like they belong on protest signs. like there’s this lyric in love it if we made it that guts me:

“selling melanin and then suffocate the black men, write it on a piece of stone, a beach of drowning three-year-olds; rest in peace lil peep, the poetry is in the streets, jesus save us, modernity has failed us.”

this was exactly when i saw the world split open. that wasn’t a song. that was a funeral speech and a social thesis and a confession all at once. you don’t put that in a pop song unless you mean to be unbearable. and yet, in a world that mostly shrugs, i’ll take unbearable over apathy any day.
the band is constantly accused of being “too much.” too political, too ironic, too pretentious, too pop. but those contradictions are their thesis. love it if we made it throws itself at the chaos of our time with a kind of manic desperation.

people hate them for that. for the name-dropping. the genre-mashing. the sneering and the softness. they are, somehow, both over-intellectualised and emotionally feral. matty healy is the boy in your class who quotes barthes and sleeps with your friend. you want to slap him. you want to write poetry about him. he’s insufferable. he’s magnetic. he says, “i come from art,” and you roll your eyes, but you listen anyway. because some part of you also believes that good art comes from drag queens and dirt and grief and godlessness.

and maybe, in a way i couldn’t admit back then, the 1975 taught me to believe i could be art, too. not beautiful art. not even likable. but complicated. the kind of girl who underlines howl and rewatches live performances with the same ache reserved for crushes and religion.

they were everything to me when nothing else stuck. when i couldn’t explain why the world felt too loud, or why i didn’t want to be kissed, or why i felt older than my bones. their music was the only thing that didn’t flatten me. it gave me permission to be dramatic. to be ugly and literate and heartbroken without a cause.

if someone had taken a photo of me at seventeen, lit only by a cracked phone screen and that line “i’d love it if we made it” reverberating through borrowed earbuds, i don’t think i would’ve looked happy. but i can tell i would’ve looked real. sometimes, i think all girlhood is myth making. and if that’s true, then this band was my myth.

matty healy once described their music as “the apocalyptic feeling of being a teenager in a major key,” and i can’t think of a better phrase to name what i couldn’t articulate then. screaming the lyrics to “robbers” in the dark; eyes half-shut, windows open to a city that wasn’t even mine— was my equivalent of kissing in the rain, getting high behind a gas station, of doing something recklessly young. i hadn’t yet lived a life worthy of nostalgia, so instead i stole some from their music.

i didn’t have a teenagehood. not a real one, not in the way you’re supposed to. there were no rooftop parties, no stupid dares, no running mascara in the bathrooms of someone else’s house. i spent most of it reading plath and pavlov, refreshing pinterest, trying to learn how to feel instead of learning how to kiss.

but i did have the 1975.

and that, i now realize, was its own coming-of-age. one soundtracked by postmodern neurosis, catholic guilt, ironic synths, beat poetry, and a frontman who quoted on the road like a twat. and i say that with absolute love.

that’s the thing. people say the 1975 name-drop philosophers and authors for clout. maybe they do. but maybe that’s the point. healy doesn’t pretend to understand every thinker he mentions— he wears them like patches on a denim jacket. nietzsche, beuys, debord, barthes— it’s the aesthetic of thinking that he’s interested in. and maybe that’s more honest than faking wisdom.

matty healy was never just some fidgety indie frontman in a leather jacket. he was a beat character in a post-digital world, raised on derrida and drag, equal parts poet, prophet, and pisshead. like ginsberg, he might’ve seen the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness— only this time they were scrolling through instagram, vaping anxiety into oblivion, and quoting camus with one hand down their jeans.

the 1975’s catalogue is a self-referential echo chamber. “i’d be an anchor but i’m scared you’d drown,” from talk! resurfaces in loving someone as “we shouldn’t have people afloat / if it was safer on the ground…” they cannibalise their own lyrics like memory eating itself.

when you realise this is the same band who used to begin their records with a sleazy little intro, slick, swagger-soaked; all neon glare and self-satisfaction—the shock lands harder. to begin instead with greta thunberg speaking on the climate crisis isn’t just anomalous; it’s disarming. on notes on a conditional form (2020), they strip away their own preamble and hand the mic to a climate activist who stares down the world dead in they eye and says, “i want you to act as if you would in a crisis. i want you to act as if the house is on fire. because it is.” she speaks about fossil fuel emissions and government inertia without the padding of politeness, in that clipped, clear-eyed way that makes adults squirm. and maybe this isn’t “music” in the traditional sense, but who cares? it’s still counts as performance— feral in its urgency, impossible to ignore. for a band whose fanbase skews young; many of whom are staring down an environmental future far bleaker than the one their parents inherited— this is less an intro than a rallying cry. as an environmentalist, i can’t explain what it meant to hear my favourite band use their platform like this— knowing full well the backlash they might face, and doing it anyway. the house is on fire— forests turn to ash, oceans choke on plastic, the air is thick with what we don’t want to name, and still, here we are, arguing over sensex. that they would interrupt the noise of pop culture to sound the alarm makes me love them in a way that feels almost protective. they didn’t care if people called it performative, political, polarising. it mattered more to them to point to the smoke pouring through the rafters: the forests collapsing into embers, the oceans curdling with oil, the air growing heavier by the year.

and the rest of the album? well, it’s a sprawling, messy thing— part synth-pop glitter, part self-indulgence, part sober confessional. not all of it works. but here, at least, they finally seem as thoughtful as they’ve always pretended to be.

and god, the lyrics. at 15, i heard chocolate and i remember looking up the lyrics because i couldn’t tell if it was mere gibberish, if he was just mumbling through a mouthful of clouds. i looked it up and found lines about teenagers, drugs, and surveillance. turns out— he was singing about teenage drug deals and run-ins with the police.

but “chocolate” was just the gateway drug. later, i’d marvel at lines like:

“hyper-politicised sexual trysts / i think my boyfriend’s a nihilist” — paris
“caught up in fashion / karcrashian panache / a bag of bash for passion” — love Me

i was obsessed with the way their lyrics weren’t just about love— they were about rotting. about guilt and bodies and boyfriends who read nietzsche and forgot your birthday.

“you’ve got to show me how to push / if you don’t want a shove,” matty pleads, trying to rewire masculinity itself. the 1975 were never “woke” in the performative sense— they were just emotionally literate in a way most men were not. they were vulnerable. and they asked you to sit with it. AND I LOVE THEM FOR THAT!!!

i come from art, matty once said. “i come from art. my grandad was one of the first drag queens in the UK… if you want good art and good shit, let people be. don’t be racist. don’t oppress women.” it sounds like a tweet. but it’s also a worldview. one that understands how subversion makes beauty. and i believe him. his grandfather was a drag queen in the UK. his bandmates are classically trained musicians who can craft symphonic irony in three minutes flat. he sings about god, addiction, transgression, the self, and he wraps it in synth-pop. that is the brilliance. it’s earnestness in disguise.

people hate them for the same reasons others love them. their maximalism is either thrilling or exhausting. their lyrics are either genius or gibberish. matty is either a philosopher-prince or a fuckboy with a god complex. the truth is: he’s both. and that’s why he works. i was certain i was the only one who really got them. that wasn’t true, but it didn’t need to be. because what they gave me was not just music— it was literacy. cultural, emotional, poetic. they handed me a key to a house i didn’t know i’d been locked out of. they never wrote of breakups. they were writing about collapse. about the wreckage of selfhood in the digital age. and about the aching need to still believe in something soft and stupid like love.

they reference themselves constantly. loving someone quotes talk!, which echoes into about you, and by the time you realize it, you’re tracing a nervous system made of guitars and guilt. their discography is a feedback loop. like growing up. or trauma. or faith.

i never went to the six gallery poetry reading in san francisco, but i imagine it felt like the first time i stood in a stadium full of kids screaming, “baby, i'll do anything that you wanna, i’ll try anything that you wanna, i’ll try, 'cause you're on my mind/ oh, caroline / i wanna get it right this time, ‘cause you're always on my mind.’’

ginsberg said poetry was to be heard aloud. so is this.

and so, the 1975 taught me how to be lonely and unlonely at the same time. they showed me that love can be ironic and real. that art can be trashy and sacred. that quoting philosophers doesn’t make you pretentious— it makes you hungry.

some critics say their music ages like milk. i think it ferments into something stronger. something foul and intoxicating. and maybe that's what adolescence is: learning how to stomach things that curdle.
and me? i’m no longer the girl screaming robbers into her bedsheets. i’ve read kurt. i’ve been to a poetry reading. i’ve loved someone who didn’t love me back. i’ve seen the way irony becomes armor, and how sincerity still slips through.

the 1975 didn’t save me. but they made not being saved sound cool as hell.

and maybe that’s enough.

even now, years later, when someone plays love it if we made it, i feel like i’m back in my bedroom, breathless and half-delusional, convinced that shouting “modernity has failed us” loud enough will make the walls bleed revolution.

you don’t understand:
to love the 1975 as a girl with mother wounds and god issues is to feel seen in ways you can’t explain without sounding completely delusional.

but then again, so is the music.

and i know i’m not the only one. i know there are thousands of us.
sitting in our rooms with the same 15 saved tiktoks of matty chain-smoking in berlin, the same playlist titled “i swear this means something,” the same screenshot of that tweet that said “the 1975 sounds like falling in love with someone who’s about to ruin your life.”

we love the band because they get it.
they get how lonely it feels to be chronically online and emotionally intense. they get how weird it is to be alive right now. to want everything and nothing. to feel too much and never enough. to be stuck in your own head with 84 tabs open and all of them are playing be my mistake.

so yeah that’s how it started. i’d hear a lyric, then google it, then fall into some internet hole about the beat poets or art theory or whatever he was on about. it led me to ginsberg, which changed me more than the band ever could. like i’d finally met someone else who thought too much and felt too hard and didn’t know where to put any of it.

and then in some interview matty’s talking about how badly we teach boys to feel and how it’s killing them. he’s right. he’s always right, even when he’s unbearable.

he’s engaged now. and i can’t explain why but i’m so stupidly happy for him it hurts!!!!!!

people hate them for the same reasons i can’t stop loving them.
the sprawling, contradictory sound. the way they feed off their own self-awareness. the frontman who can be both prophet and prick in the span of a verse. it’s all there in the tiny details: the way album after album begins with the same self‑titled track, rewritten and re‑coloured like they’re reintroducing themselves to you each time. or how they tuck little callbacks between records, stitching one era to the next.

and then there’s her.
the girl i’ve loved more than anyone, ever.
we play “about you” on repeat and by the time carly holt gets to:

and there was something ’bout you that now i can’t remember
it’s the same damn thing that made my heart surrender

we’re already wrecked. and i just want to look at her, and scream it into her face— I LIKE IT WHEN YOU SLEEP FOR YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL YET SO UNAWARE OF IT.

sometimes i think about how much of my life circles back to this band.
how i’ve built whole friendships on shared blends. how the 1975 is the closest i’ve come to feeling like i belong to something.

and then i’m back at glastonbury, watching him crumble in front of thousands.
and i want to tell him, you made it.
and i want to tell myself, you did too.

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p.s. this year has been all about the 1975. being so chronically online that i posted a throwaway thread about them— some half-formed thought about their lyrics. and somehow, it found its way to a boy. now, apparently, we can’t do without each other. now we’re in each other’s pockets, all the time, like we’re incapacitated and lost. it’s dumb and frantic and i don’t even know how to hold it without shaking but god, i love it. i love that art does this. that you can be obsessing over a song and it throws you headfirst into another person’s life. i can’t imagine not posting that thread. can’t imagine not having this stupid boy in my dms now. it’s so human. how art and abstraction can drag you by the collar toward new corners of your life. how you can follow a song and end up in someone’s orbit.

i wish he knew what it means to play a song and be instantly thrown into the geography of someone’s presence!!!! i wish he knew that every time matty sings, i will never make it right if you don’t want me around, i feel that stupid, ugly truth in my throat. maybe the 1975 wouldn’t ruin me the way they do if it wasn’t for that one girl and that one boy. the girl who slipped herself into my veins like it was nothing, like it wasn’t going to rewire me forever. and the boy — god, the boy— who found me because i couldn’t shut up about them online.

buy me a cherry