walking upstream…
The 1975
photo: raph_ph · cc by 4.0 ↗The 1975
sourcesThe Guardian — "The 1975's Matt Healy · Uproxx — "The 1975's Matty Healy Made Emos Smile By Playing The American Football 'Never Meant' Riff In A New Clip" (American Football influence) · Radio.com — "New Music To Know · BBC Radio 1 — "How The 1975 went from a school covers band to modern pop icons" (bio) · Wikipedia — The 1975
In 2002, four schoolboys in Wilmslow, Cheshire started a covers band under a run of forgettable names — Talkhouse, Bigsleep, Forever Enjoying Sex — with Matty Healy on drums, until the original singer quit and pushed him to the microphone. It took a decade, five EPs, and a note found on the back page of a Jack Kerouac paperback ("1st June — The 1975") to reach a self-titled debut that hit UK No. 1 in 2013. Healy calls the band "copyists," and means it as a badge: the songs splice arena hooks, shoegaze fuzz, and quiet-storm soul into one teenage-bedroom mythology, indebted openly to the John Hughes films he grew up on — "if he made a movie about us, this would be the soundtrack." The band's sound was never one thing; it was everything Healy was willing to steal.
the sound in question
2013
RobbersThe 1975
walk the tributaries ↓
Peter Gabriel1980s · Art rock / Pop rock / Worldbeat
Healy names Peter Gabriel's 1986 album So among the five records that changed his life, and for once the claim gets specific rather than reverent. Gabriel, he told MTV in 2013, made records that were "very forward-thinking pieces of work but also had big international smash hits" — then he named the exact debt: "You've got 'Don't Give Up' as well, and that informed a lot of our music stylistically. I mean, 'Falling For You' is 'Don't Give Up.' That was our version of that."
listen: upstream & heresource: MTV News — "Five Life-Changing Records That The 1975 Recommend" (Peter Gabriel and Michael Jackson influences) ↗
1986
Don't Give UpPeter Gabriel
2013
Falling For YouThe 1975
listen forPlay Gabriel and Kate Bush trading verses over "Don't Give Up"'s hushed, single-note synth pulse — the song holds its dynamics back for minutes, letting the exchange between voices do the work. "Falling For You" borrows that patience: a spare, chiming guitar figure under Healy's plainest verse-singing on the whole debut album, building toward a chorus that never quite explodes. Same restraint, redressed for 2013.
Michael Jackson1980s · Pop / R&B / Funk
Healy calls Michael Jackson's 1987 album Bad his main vocal influence, tracing a specific songwriting habit straight back to it: "He's my main inspiration vocally because I write the rhythm of the vocals before I write the lyrics, and I'm pretty sure that he did that," he told MTV in 2013. "Like 'Chocolate,' for example — I didn't think of it melodically, it's all about playing off of what the guitars are doing." It's less a sound he copied than a method he adopted.
listen: upstream & heresource: MTV News — "Five Life-Changing Records That The 1975 Recommend" (Peter Gabriel and Michael Jackson influences) ↗
1988
Man in the MirrorMichael Jackson
2013
ChocolateThe 1975
listen forCue up "Man in the Mirror" and hear how Jackson clips his phrasing into the beat — vocal ad-libs and the choir's call-and-response entries land like percussion against a steady piano pulse. "Chocolate" does the same trick without gospel or piano: Healy's verse vocal snaps onto the same clipped, staccato pattern as the guitar riff underneath it, syllables landing on the off-beats instead of floating a melody over the top. Same rhythm-first logic, different genre entirely.
American Football1990s · Midwest emo / Emo / Indie rock
American Football is the one influence Healy named unprompted in his very first interview back in 2013, and he's kept returning to it. On a 2022 podcast with the Illinois band's frontman Mike Kinsella, Healy described hearing their hushed, math-inflected 1999 debut "in 2004 on Limewire," calling it "this kind of really, really beautiful moment that stood outside of what was considered emo-rock" — "nothingness," he said, "a celebration of the mundane." Months later he was filmed quietly playing the album's most-memed riff.
listen: upstream & heresource: Far Out Magazine — "Matty Healy and Mike Kinsella discuss American Football, punk and emo" (American Football influence) ↗
1999
Never MeantAmerican Football
2013
SexThe 1975
listen for"Never Meant" opens on two clean guitars trading a looping, finger-picked riff — no distortion, no big chorus, just interlocking arpeggios under a hushed, conversational vocal about a breakup neither party can quite name. "Sex" keeps that same confessional scale in a different register: verses built from clean, chiming guitar figures before the chorus finally opens into the fuzzed-out hook Healy has literally introduced onstage as "an emo classic." Listen for that hushed-to-loud shift the emo playbook taught him.