A version of this story appears in the upcoming issue of Entertainment Weekly, on newsstands Friday. Buy it here or subscribe now for more exclusive interviews and photos, only in EW.
Pop outfit the 1975 rose to a new level of fame in 2016 with the release of their sophomore record, I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful yet So Unaware of It. Though the album — which was full of ambitiously nostalgic anthems like “Somebody Else” and “Love Me” — hit No. 1 in the States, frontman Matty Healy doesn’t seem too concerned with outdoing the band’s previous success. Instead, he’s focused on authenticity.
“Every time I tried to do what other people wanted, I failed,” he tells EW. “When I started to do what I believed in, I succeeded. [With] the second record I wasn’t thinking about what people liked about the first record, I just wanted it to be great songs I loved.”
Healy has maintained that same ethos for the next phase of the 1975, dubbed Music For Cars. The name speaks to the environment he wants to convey. “Most of my teenage years were spent in cars…smoking weed and listening to music,” says Healy. The first part of that new era is the quartet’s third album, A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, an unfiltered, genre-crossing look at cultural consumption. And the group has more in store for 2019, when their fourth LP, Notes on a Conditional Form, drops in May.
Ahead of its release on Nov. 30, Healy reveals in his own words the music and movies that inspired A Brief Inquiry.
Edward Scissorhands
Edward Scissorhands has always been a big thing for me — visually, that’s who I wanted to be when I was younger. [In] “Ice Dance” by Danny Elfman, which is on the soundtrack to Edward Scissorhands, I think you can hear references to [our new] music…. The next album [Notes on a Conditional Form] is quite heavily inspired by soundtracks. Soundtracks are how I see my albums because they go all over the place but they make sense. That’s how I think of a 1975 record.
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