The 1975 at MGM Music Hall: Synecdoche, On Tour
A review, four months late.
Note: I wrote this back in November and filed it away, but after reading Emma Garland’s great piece “Why Do Men, Specifically, Hate The 1975?” and thinking she absolutely nailed the band’s love-hate appeal, I thought I’d put it out there. Here are 1500 words on a concert that happened four months ago.
“The 1975 At Their Very Best,” the massive screens at MGM Music Hall declare, plastered with photos of four smug, suited white guys. “We are the world’s greatest band,” frontman Matty Healy announces to the screaming, sold-out crowd. The 1975 is a band that dares to speak in hyperbole, but you’ll walk out of this concert neither agreeing nor disagreeing with their claims—but trying to decipher whether they themselves believe it.
On their first of two nights at MGM Music Hall, after which they will headline Madison Square Garden, the band brings a dramatic, somewhat indecipherable, yet exceptionally danceable show. They sound better than ever, whether they’re playing lovelorn acoustic ballads or political punk or EDM. The posturing and theatrics are tinged with meta-irony, as if the band are performing what it’s like to be a rock band in 2022, instead of actually being one. Pretentious, yes, but it’s also awfully characteristic of the age we live in. In a world that’s disposed of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll in favor of porn, rehab, and radio-friendly pop-rock, The 1975 make a great case that the latter is just as cool.
The concert is theater, and the set is a disorienting model of a two-story house reminiscent of Synecdoche, New York. It’s filled with mid-century modern furniture of Mad Men moodboard dreams: bookcases, staircases, doorways, windows, and a stack of vintage TVs that flicker to the rhythm.
The show is a two-act play. In the meditative first, the band plays their latest album “Being Funny in a Foreign Language” almost track-by-track. “It's cynical/This Adderall/And vitriol/And young people drinking Aperol!” the crowd screams loyally when the band emerges with their first song, the LCD Soundsystem-esque “The 1975” (every album they’ve released opens with a track with the same title; it’s part of the lore they’ve built around themselves). It’s followed by two upbeat love songs, “Looking for Somebody (to Love)” and “Happiness.” The crowd sings along faithfully, as if they’ve been listening to the album on repeat since it came out just three weeks prior.
It helps that their lyrics are just so damn fun to sing out loud. “Am I ironically woke? The butt of my joke? Or am I just some post-coke, average, skinny bloke calling his ego imagination?” Healy muses in “Part of the Band,” a violin-heavy track off their latest album, sitting in a lounge chair and looking dreamily into the distance. The band doesn’t interact with the audience in the first half of the show, forcing the crowd to be voyeurs in their living room. This creates a bit of distance from the casual concertgoers who don’t know every song, but it’s hard to believe the band cares.
Every great Manchester band needs a tortured frontman, and Matty Healy plays the part to a T. A tattooed, greasy-haired dirtbag who slips the word “postmodern” into every other song, he spends much of the show smoking cigarettes and drinking out of a flask. Are they props? Healy’s slurring and stumbling by the end of the show suggest not, but don’t put it past him to perform that too.
Healy, who used to take the stage with the zoned-out indifference of a young Julian Casablancas, is now doing David Byrne, if David Byrne cared about being sexy. Suited and dancing in a “groovy dad” manner, his vocals are nearly indistinguishable from the records. Guitarist Adam Hann, bassist Ross MacDonald and drummer George Daniel are cool and collected, the perfectly precise foils to Healy’s antics. Four more members in the backing band scale the songs up for the stadium, and a cameraman runs around the stage, capturing the best angles to blow up onto the two massive screens on each side of the arena.
Next up are “Oh Caroline” and “I’m in Love With You,” the perfect songs for fervent fans to scream into their tagalong boyfriends’ ears. When the lofty, atmospheric fan favorite “Fallingforyou” comes on, Healy spreads his arms out, mirroring a crucifixion, and the room takes on a religious ardor. He rides the high, climbing onto the “roof” of the house for a piano-backed rendition of the electronic track “I Like America & America Likes Me.”
“About You,” a moody highlight from the new album about loves forgotten, envelops the room in a comforting melancholy. The boyband-worthy acoustic ballad “When We Are Together” sounds even better live, with Healy crooning on the verge of tears, proving the band is just as good stripped-down. He keeps the acoustic guitar on for “Be My Mistake,” but his tenderness is masked by the crowd’s screams of elation and disbelief that they’re hearing this oft-forgotten song from their third album live.
When the synthy instrumental track “An Encounter” begins on playback, bassist MacDonald walks across the set and turns off every lamp one by one. A lone spotlight illuminates Healy, and the vintage TVs start playing fuzzy montages of conservative figures Andrew Tate, Ben Shapiro, and Liz Truss. In one of the show’s most confounding moments, and the band’s attempt at commentary on masculinity and the internet radicalization pipeline, Healy takes his shirt off, gets on the floor and does several push-ups, and crawls into one of the TVs, cueing the end of the first act.
He leaves the crowd in confusion until the opening synths of the uptempo “If You're Too Shy (Let Me Know)” kick in. The stage lights up in colors we haven’t seen all night, and the band starts on a high-energy retrospective of their greatest, most danceable, most devastating hits. There’s “It's Not Living (If It's Not With You),” an upbeat ode to narcotics masked as a love song, “Robbers,” with a refrain that requires screaming, and “Somebody Else,” a universally loved clubby heartbreak hit that first gave the band critical cred.
The band also makes room for some less popular tracks. The two big surprises on the setlist were “Medicine,” which twinkles like streetlamps on a late-night drive, and “I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes),” anthemic enough to put the band on the pantheon of Britpop and make Oasis jealous. “Thanks for letting us play our favorites,” Healy says. “We can’t please everyone, so we’ll just please our fucking selves.” He makes a jerk-off motion.
The brash rockstar posturing continues after “Love It If We Made It,” the band’s distressed Trump-era version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” that contains a Kanye West reference. “I don’t talk very seriously anymore,” Healy says, possibly referring to the time he was “soft-canceled” for adding a link to a 1975 music video in a post about George Floyd’s death. “But fuck Kanye,” he says, and the crowd erupts in support. “If you’re gonna do fascism, at least do it right.”
If The 1975 ever decides to try fascism, their dedicated fanbase will certainly give them a head start. During “The Sound,” an unabashedly catchy house track, Hann’s maximalist guitar solo explodes, and Healy orders the crowd to “fucking jump!” They oblige. The crowd stays fiery through “Sex,” an apocalyptic track about a girl with a boyfriend. The band finishes off with “Give Yourself A Try,” a deceptively positive banger with a guitar riff lifted from Joy Division’s “Disorder,” which finally gets them to let loose. As the euphoria overcomes the crowd, Healy dons an oxygen mask and splays on the floor—which he’s done at every show of tour so far. Is he actually out of breath, or is it just part of the performance? “Is he doing Whip-its?” somebody in the crowd asks.
A 1975 show is like a box of chocolates—you never know what you’re gonna get. Just don’t expect them to play “Chocolate,” the 2013 radio staple that first put them on the map. Some fans stuck around, screaming for an encore, but left disappointed. It’s a bold move, but it signifies that The 1975 is bigger than their biggest hit—they’ve spent all night proving it.
“The world’s greatest band” is a bit of a stretch, but there’s something to the fact that The 1975 was the only one to make it out of the mid-2010s white-boy indie band boom. That era produced many bands who never achieved mainstream longevity—the Cage the Elephants, Two Door Cinema Clubs, and Catfish and the Bottlemens of the world, who are certainly not selling out Madison Square Garden.
How did The 1975 get here? Maybe it’s the comprehensible band name, or the dedicated online fanbase, or the larger-than-life frontman. The ambition to touch every musical genre there is, or the hyperspecific observations on the postmodern condition. The audacity to call themselves great, bracing themselves for the onslaught of hate comments. The ability to make fun of themselves, to give the people something to talk about.
“They’re a great band,” my Gen X film studies professor tells me. “They’re past their prime,” says my plus-one to the show. “Production geniuses,” a friend from home contributes. “Very jealous that you saw them,” texts a former fling. “Matt Healy is cringe,” says a Kanye-loving classmate.
Great rock bands should be a bit weird, a bit divisive, a bit inscrutable. Equally lovable and despicable. Cool as hell, even if it’s a little contrived. At MGM Music Hall, The 1975 invites their audience to be in on the joke. It sounds good, so why not take them up on it?