Matty Healy believes The 1975 were “hated” as they came through at a time when heavy “post-punk” music was popular.
The ‘Love Me’ singer has suggested the reason the indie-pop band didn’t get signed right away was because labels were choosing bands “doing an impression” of the Arctic Monkeys, and the fact they didn’t “adhere” to the “aesthetic of post-punk”.
Appearing on the ‘Doom Scroll’ podcast, he said: “Every band that got signed over us was a band that was essentially doing an impression of the Arctic Monkeys.
“So what they were saying is, a band has to be from an economically deprived place in order to have authenticity. It needs to be kind of gritty. It needs to reference, at the time, the kind of the aesthetics of post-punk.
“So like, you know, all of your Joy Division, industrialisation, Thatcherism, brutalism, all those kinds of things. And we just didn’t adhere to any of that…”
Matty says he and his bandmates – who released their self-titled debut studio album in 2013 – can do “heavy”, as evident on their 2019 track ‘People’, but it’s nothing “new”, and they wanted to be different, regardless of whether it didn’t appeal to everyone.
He went on: “And I was like, well, after [1998’s] ‘The Shape of Punk to Come’ came out – [it was] the last punk album – it knew that. Refused – they split up because they were politically so different… And in their last show, the cops came. It makes me want to cry; I get chills thinking about it.
“The cops came in, and all of their fans turned around and shouted the line from ‘Rather Be Dead’: ‘I’d rather be alive.’ And they’re just shouting, ‘I’d rather be alive. I’d rather be alive,’ as Refused physically disbanded.
“Because for me… unless you’re Glassjaw, Converge, Refused, or further than that, heavy is f****** lame. So the reason we’re not heavy – and we can do heavy all day long – but we’re not because it wasn’t new. We wanted to be something quite new.”