This Friday, British band The 1975 will headline Glastonbury Festival for the first time. It’s a career-defining moment for them that’s been twelve years in the making. The band first played the festival in 2013.
Despite massive global success over those twelve years, the four-piece from Manchester, fronted by Matty Healy, will know certain sections of the media and the public already have their claws out, ready to pounce.
It’s unfair but inevitable. Healy is currently better known as Taylor Swift’s ex. In the UK he’s never quite thrown off the “nepo baby” label, as the son of two TV personalities. Then there’s Healy’s habit of letting his mouth run unchecked wherever he is, courting controversy and online cancellation in the process. Finally, there’s the fact that teenage girls love the 1975. It shouldn’t matter – teenage girls made The Beatles famous after all – but in the misogynistic music press, it really does.
So you can bet Healy and bandmates George Daniel, Ross Macdonald and Adam Hann will be feeling the pressure. You can also bet they’ll put on a stellar show. If you’ve never gone “in deep” with The 1975’s music, here are twelve tracks that show why they’re one of the defining bands of the century.
The “Apocalyptic Sense of Being a Teenager” Era, 2013-14
1. Sex („The 1975“, 2013)
Written when they were just 18, “Sex” is the 1975’s blueprint. Musically, the song is a bit of an albatross in their catalogue, an undeniably catchy indie guitar track from a band that’s mostly not a guitar band. They range across multiple genres on every one of their five albums. “We create as we consume,” Healy has always said. In the streaming age, no one listens to just one genre any more. Even their self-titled debut goes far beyond the 80s-inspired synth pop they’re most associated with.
Thematically, the diverse tracks of their debut are pulled together in the way they document and romanticise dull teenage life in the suburbs. Musically the common thread is the structures of dance music. On “Sex”, the screech of the top-line guitar and the bouncy rhythm guitar below it, plus the Mancunian-wannabe Cockney vocals Healy employed in the early days, provide an immediate, vital experience that pulls you in. There’s no proper chorus. 1975 songs rarely have one. “Sex” builds and builds in intensity, its bridge a trio of thrashing yet still melodic guitars. The 1975 can never not sound melodic, even at their heaviest.
And ironically, the experience “Sex” documents is the truest, most honest experience of teenage life: trying yet failing to actually have sex. So much of being a teenager is yearning, anticipation and unrequited desire, and the 1975 do that better than anyone.
Chances of being played at Glastonbury: 100%. It’s one of their most iconic songs.
2. Chocolate („The 1975“, 2013)
Ask a random person to name a song by the 1975 and they’ll probably say “Chocolate”. Despite its ubiquity, as a piece of music it’s still under-appreciated. It’s a perky, poppy, 80s funk-influenced track that really showcases the band’s abilities as songwriters and musicians.
Structure-wise, “Chocolate” employs techniques the band have used again and again, taken from 80s pop like Tears for Fears: simple repeated refrain on the lead guitar, more rhythmically complex repeated refrain on rhythm guitar, no proper chorus, lyrics that don’t rhyme. It sounds basic, like anyone could do it, but you can’t. There’s a magic, indefinable ingredient in there that only the 1975 can carry off.
“Chocolate” is a narrative song too, a tale of typical dull teenage life in suburbia. This is Healy’s lyrical stock-in-trade: telling specific yet somehow universally relatable stories that are both funny and poignant. On “Chocolate”, we’re driving around in a car owned by someone’s parents, smoking weed and evading the local police in a chase that’s simultaneously predictable, tedious and quite exciting. How teenage. How relatable. Like “Sex”, “Chocolate”’s big, romantic sound documents a humdrum, repetitive, small-town existence. It’s the juxtaposition (one of Healy’s favourite words) of reality and imagination and again, how quintessentially teenage.
Chances of being played at Glastonbury: 80%. The band love it. The fans love it. There are just too many great songs for a setlist these days.
3. M.O.N.E.Y. („The 1975“, 2013)
This might seem an odd choice if you know the band, but “M.O.N.E.Y.”, the second track on their debut, perfectly showcases the twin talents of Healy as lyricist/singer and George Daniel as sound designer/producer to brilliant effect. It’s a weird song and it shows that from the off: the band have always been unafraid to experiment and be a bit weird. To a backdrop of glitchy electro-pop effects paired with organic funk sounds once summed up as “like Prince in outer space”, Healy half sings/half raps Mike Skinner from The Streets-style about an obnoxious, wasted guy on a night out in Manchester. It might be a friend; it might be Healy himself.
On “M.O.N.E.Y.”, he plays both the colourful subject of the narrative as he stumbles from one disaster to another and the frustrated police officer having to deal with him: “I’m searching you mate. Your jaw’s all over the place…Look, the dog won’t bark if you don’t lark about..” Healy even punctuates the lines with an audible weary sigh. He can be very funny as a writer, particularly when he’s mocking himself.
Chances of being played at Glastonbury: 0%. Not played regularly since the very early days.
The “Postmodern, Intellectual Rock Star” era (2015-2017)
4. Love Me („I Like It When You Sleep for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It“, 2016)
By 2016, the band were negotiating massive fame, often negative media attention, mental health concerns and drugs. All standard fare for a second album, but The 1975 approached things differently. Increasingly, Matty Healy’s interest in cultural studies and the impact of the internet on our individual subjectivity and relationships with others was coming to the fore. If he had to be famous, he was determined to give it purpose.
“Love Me”, the first proper track from the 1975’s second album, is a mission statement, Healy sending up his newly acquired status as Sexy Rock Star to Prince-esque pop-funk. Here, they combine the music with biting social satire that’s only become more relevant in the decade since: “You look famous, let’s be friends/And portray we possess something important”, perfectly skewers influencer culture that’s even more pervasive today than in 2015.
Healy’s postmodern, self-aware perception of himself in particular is a trope he’s deployed ever since. He knows that you know that he knows he’s parodying himself, playing the rock star who loves himself. But really, we all know the rock star schtick is tired and passe. “Love me, if that’s what you wanna do,” he shrugs nonchalantly. But then again, he also wants to be loved and these are the paradoxes that make us human.
“Love Me” is just one jewel in an album stuffed full of songs that sound like massive pop hits. Central to this is George Daniel, who said I Like It When You Sleep… was when he really started to believe in his own talents as a producer.
Chances of being played at Glastonbury: 60%. Again, there are just too many great songs, but it sometimes pops up, especially at a festival.
5. A Change of Heart („I Like It When You Sleep…“, 2016)
The 1975 have always stolen openly from their influences. But they steal and transform, and it’s in that process that meaning is created. The melody of “A Change of Heart” sounds like Yazoo’s 80s classic “Only You”, except that song was about eternal love. “A Change of Heart” is about falling out of love, becoming jaded and disillusioned with the person you used to idolise. It’s about drugs too, and the way intimate moments are mediated by the internet, both enduring themes for The 1975.
As seductive a melody as “A Change of Heart” has, it’s Healy’s lyrics that really make the song. It was written several years before he spoke publicly about his heroin habit, but he portrays drugs in the way he always does: with a combination of disgust and disdain. The one thing Healy never romanticises is drugs. “I’ve been so worried ‘bout you lately. You look shit and you smell a bit,” his partner says to him. Then there are possibly the best lines ever written about social media’s degrading effect on human communication: “You said I’m full of diseases/Your eyes were full of regret/And then you took a picture of your salad and put it on the internet”. Ultimately, the song juxtaposes a beautiful sound with a harsh message, and that too is a hallmark of the 1975.
Chances of being played at Glastonbury: 90%. A classic.
6. Somebody Else („I Like It When You Sleep…“, 2016)
“Somebody Else” is one of the band’s best, and best loved, songs. It’s a slow builder, nearly six minutes of deceptively simple, groovy synth pop that speaks to George Daniel’s ear for a great hook. “Somebody Else” is the kind of song that feels like it’s made of glass, the kind that needs earphones and quiet surroundings to really appreciate its soundscape. It’s a break-up song made for dancing alone in your living room at 2am and having a bit of a cry.
Healy’s lyrics contribute to this too. “I took all my things that make sound/The rest I could do without” are the kind of heartbreaking lines that stay with you long after the song’s over. The internet makes a thematic appearance again too: we can all relate to “I’m looking through you while you’re looking through your phone”. We’ve all seen couples behaving like this. We’ve probably done it ourselves. Quite simply a masterpiece in modern songwriting.
Chances of being played at Glastonbury: 100%. Healy said he was tired of it for a bit, but we’re not. And he’s not really either. He knows it ranks among his best work.
7. Loving Someone („I Like It When You Sleep…“, 2016)
The band’s sophomore album is so good, it’s really difficult to narrow down the best songs from it, but “Loving Someone” can’t be cut from the list. By rights it should be unbearable. It’s not the music – it’s another synth pop classic built on a signature George Daniel groove. The lyrics are just.. a lot. Over four minutes, Healy throws everything he’s interested in at the wall: consumer capitalism, heteronormativity, toxic masculinity before it was really talked of outside academic circles, an awkward reference to situationist theorist Guy Debord, the refugee small boat crisis. Then he throws in some T.S. Eliot-esque spoken word poetry for good measure at the end. Yet you can’t really argue these are all vital messages, as relevant now as they were a decade ago.
The song is an early hint at the political turn the band took on their next two albums. And as lofty as it is, it has some of Healy’s best self-deprecating humour in “I’m the Greek economy of cashing intellectual cheques/And I’m trying to progress”.
Chances of being played at Glastonbury: 20%. It should be played, but after being unsuccessfully sued by the Malaysian government for kissing bandmate Ross Macdonald on stage in 2023, Healy has shied away from overt political statements. Glastonbury could be the perfect time to bring it back though.
The “Online Life Is Destroying Us” Era (2018-2019)
8. Love It If We Made It („A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships“, 2018)
On their third and most critically acclaimed album, a post-rehab Healy has a laser focus on social ills in the internet age. All this finds its peak in “Love It If We Made It”. An award-winning, explicitly political track that Brian Eno said he wished he’d written, it’s the band’s best song: an 80s-inspired synth pop track that makes us want to dance but simultaneously confronts us with all the horrors of our modern age. Healy half-raps over driving, industrial drums about Trump’s first Presidency, the collapse of truth in the internet age, the impotence of the media and the casual cruelty of the very rich in the face of it all.
Musically, the song is a masterpiece of composition and production, possibly the most sonically beautiful rant you’ve ever heard. Healy narrates but never states, which lends the song even more power. “Modernity has failed us,” is the closest he gets to a declaration on the state of the nation. In 2018, a reviewer called that line “windy and overblown”. In 2025, it’s a pretty accurate and tragic summation of the global picture. “Love It If We Made It” has only become more relevant in the seven years since it was written, the wishful, yearning optimism in its title even more desperately poignant.
Chances of being played at Glastonbury: 100%. Healy said he really didn’t want to be performing the song now, and you wish he didn’t have to, but also we need its message, and we know he knows that.
9. It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You) („A Brief Inquiry…“, 2018)
“It’s Not Living…” is musically the best example of the 80s-influenced synth pop The 1975 are most associated with. But it’s not that simple, of course. It never is. Production-wise, the song needs earphones to hear all the layers of sound, the way the synths are layered with guitars, a honky-tonk piano, soaring, choir-like backing vocals and Healy’s own voice. If you want to know why the 1975-imitators never sound anywhere near as good as the real thing, it’s in all the tiny production details, the painstaking effort that goes into each track. On “It’s Not Living…” we see this in full, living colour.
Lyrically, Healy wrongfoots us in typical style. “It’s Not Living…” sounds like a love song and in a way it is, but a love song to heroin. Just the lines “Collapse my veins wearing beautiful shoes/It’s not living if it’s not with you” carry so much heft when it comes to appearances vs grim reality and the struggle to get clean. It sounds so pretty, but it’s absolutely heartbreaking.
Chances of being played at Glastonbury: 100%. One of Healy’s own favourites and a set mainstay.
The “Notes on a Musical Life” era (2019-2020)
10. People („Notes on a Conditional Form“, 2020)
“People” confounded a lot of people when it dropped on the eve of the band’s biggest headline slot to date, Reading Festival 2019. Musically it’s their heaviest song, rock with a capital R, all distorted bass, sawing guitars and screamo lyrics. There’s no other song in their discography that sounds like it, and yet there is: the track owes a lot to the emo and hardcore scenes the band grew up in in the 2000s.
“People” really proved the 1975 could do any genre and do it astoundingly well. Lyrically, it was eerily prescient with the lines “Fuck it, I’m just gonna get girls, food, gear/I don’t like going outside so bring me everything here”. Months later, COVID struck and the world as we knew it imploded. The chorus – “People like people/They want alive people” – acquired a whole new significance. Healy laughed off the idea he had somehow predicted the future, but not for the first time the band were ahead of their time in the ideas they were exploring.
Chances of being played at Glastonbury: 60%. They might open with it as they did at Reading festival in 2019. They might close with it. Live, it’s always been electric.
11. The Birthday Party („Notes on a Conditional Form“, 2019)
Notes on a Conditional Form, the 1975’s sprawling, 22-track fourth album, confused and divided listeners. It’s a bit weird and in all senses just a lot, dubbed “the most 1975 album” by one reviewer. When you think of it as a record made by two lifelong music obsessives paying tribute to the sounds they love, it makes more sense.
“The Birthday Party” provides an interesting contrast with the narratives of youthful hedonism on the band’s debut. A post-rehab Healy, now approaching 30 and increasingly aware of growing older, recounts being sober at a birthday party while all the other guests are in different places in the moment and in life itself. It’s a brilliant portrayal of how tedious and testing these social occasions can be, both funny and devastating lyrically. There’s a subtle LCD Soundsystem reference in the line “All your friends in one place,” but instead of a nostalgic, collective experience, Healy is lectured for being out of the scene: “Don’t be don’t be a fridge, you better wise up kid/It’s all Adderall now…” He argues with a girlfriend and another mate and ends the song on a quiet note of reflection that’s haunting: “I depend on my friends to stay clean/As sad as it seems”.
Musically, “The Birthday Party” is the band at their most restrained, with looping acoustic and slide guitars, a banjo and subtle drums instead of a big, 80s-style sound. It sounds a bit American, inspired by Bon Iver and Pinegrove. It’s one of the few songs the band wrote collectively in a studio rather than Healy and Daniel hunched over a laptop and is an interesting precursor to the turn their fifth album took.
Chances of being played at Glastonbury: 10%. Not one for that crowd, probably, but with the 1975, you never truly know what to expect.
The “At their very best” era (2022-)
12. Part of the Band („Being Funny in a Foreign Language“, 2022)
“Part of the Band” is the weirdest song on the band’s most compact, most mainstream-friendly fifth album. Produced by Jack Antonoff, the record as a whole features plenty of the 80s-inspired big pop songs that are the group’s calling card and went on to be huge crowd pleasers. But on lead single “Part of the Band” they went to an entirely different place. Their first release in over two years, it was a brave choice and a lot of people hated it. But as Healy would probably say, they’re missing out.
Musically, the song is led by an orchestra of discordant cellos and violins, which isn’t what anyone expects of the 1975. The band wanted this album to showcase their abilities and vast experience as live musicians, and it really shows on this track. The 30-second instrumental bridge is where it all comes home and it’s a thing of beauty. “Part of the Band” is probably the oddest song pop mastermind Jack Antonoff has ever touched, and it just works.
The top line melody is led just by Healy’s vocal. “Part of the Band” is an autobiography of sorts, him at his most startlingly reflective, witty and poetic. All this reaches its climax in the song’s arresting final lines. “Am I ironically woke? The butt of my joke? Or am I just some post-coke, average, skinny bloke? Calling his ego imagination,” Healy reflects. He knows that you know he knows what lots of people think of him, just as he knows the lurid obsession many have with whether or not he’s back on drugs. “I’ve not picked up that in a thousand four hundred days/And nine hours and sixteen minutes, babe,” is his kiss-off. And then there’s the emotional gut-punch: “It’s kind of my daily iteration”.
Chances of being played at Glastonbury: 30%. It’s probably not one for the Pyramid Stage, but as always with the 1975, expect the unexpected.
You can watch The 1975 headline Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage live here.