It's well established that in this crazy world of entertainment that requires a never-ending amount of attention that the one who 'wins' isn't necessarily the one you think it is, but it's the one you just somehow cannot stop being curious about even when you don't even really want to be.

This is why New York Magazine put "Not Katy, Not Miley, Not Gaga, Why Taylor Swift is the Biggest Pop Star in the World." on their cover, in 2013. Aptly so, as we see in 2019 blockbuster record sales following last years blockbuster stadium tour in a fairly singular way. They attribute her success to 'breaking the fourth wall' with her fans, to being relatable, to not nicely fitting within a genre, for focusing on the craft of songwriting and therefore become "rock critic’s darling who hasn’t the faintest whiff of countercultural cool about her".

And suddenly now that The 1975's fourth upcoming album, NOTES ON A CONDITIONAL FORM has been announced for release in early 2020 and it feels like where Taylor was seven years ago. She was always good, she always knew where she was going – it just took a while for the rest of us to catch up. The 1975 is going from being everyone's favourite band to hate (with NME famously calling them the worst band in the world) to the music press now falling over themselves in praise of their third album and the fourth is posed to be even better.

The 1975 seem confident in their work as tickets for a tour following an album that isn't out for months are already on sale.

From a personal persepctive, Spotify has thought for years that The 1975 should be right up my alley and I can't even tell you how anti-The 1975 I was. I would genuinely find their sound so annoying I would go out of my way to skip their songs. Chocolate, no thank you. It's probably my most skipped song in my entire Spotify history, because it was on every playlist I listened to, and I just would not or could not get into it.

It takes a certain kind of presence though to cultivate the anti as much as building the follow. It needs to be original to get a strong reaction like that. I liked their branding if that's something ( // A L L O F T H E I R T W E E T S A R E F O R M A T T E D L I K E T H I S F O R A N E X A M P L E // L O V E ), but I just couldn't stand the music even though I like literally everything else on this rock-pop boundary they occupy.

Now, the NME is writing 'how-to' guides for how to produce exactly their sound. 

What changed? For me, I got to see a behind-the-scenes setting up the production at The O2 in London earlier this year for The 1975. The attention to detail they give to the production is comparable to Steve Jobs' for phones and computers. It's a 800-ton production that requires accuracy to be within a millimetre, and that is not an exaggeration, I saw it. The stage manager explained it to me. Positioning the stage needs the length of the arena as a runway to fit exactly in the right spot so the LED-cave frontman Matt Healy disappears into works and the treadmill that runs along the front of the stage fits.

To go back to the Taylor Swift comparison, it doesn't matter if it's not to your taste for you to respect the motherfucking craft. Not only did I walk out of the O2 with my jaw on the floor, but I ended up running into men in their early 40s later that evening who were buzzing from the exceptionality of the show. First of all, I hardly ever run into someone after a show on account of how London works, and this level of buzzing was on par with my teenage sisters after they saw Justin Beiber perform live. It was a lot.

When people feel this passionately about something, whether that's The 1975 themselves having their specially made LED screens ("to make it tighter") lined up so perfectly one can't see where one ends and the next one begins – or the 40-year-old fanboys who flew in from Florida to be there, there's something there.

There's a Swiftian 'breaking the fourth wall' element to Healy's personality that makes each individual person in an arena day after day feel seen, heard, noticed, spoken for. Their live recordings all include multiple moments from the audience, and not just the front row but a close-up of individual persons somewhere in the crowd who are not just nodding along but speaking the lyrics as if they're their own truth.

It's powerful. The crowd doesn't need the band to be cool, or for themselves to be cool. They're there for themselves in a way that simply isn't true at every concert. See timestamp 1:02:05 on the full live show (embedded above) to see a close up of a fan's face not just mouthing the words to sing along to Somebody Else, but she's like speaking them to herself with a smile and without a sense of performance, which is so increasingly rare in our era of phone cameras and social media likes.

And it's not the only shot like that. There are so many. And then the most engaged comments for that song say things like "This song makes me miss an ex that I never had" and "yayyyy my ex got a new gf so i can finally relate to this song" and confessing their breakups or even lack of breakups and staying up late to dancing along to the performance when they should be in bed. Like, they're having these conversations in a YouTube comment. And one after another find that the live version is even more magnificent than the recorded one.

And that's not because the recorded one isn't already killer. GQ's praise took a deep dive into what makes them special is Healy's embrace of what is and lack of fantasy almost and love of the real. Real things, real people, real feelings. The comparison drawn there is against Radiohead who spent their entire careers being anti-whatever is happening, while The 1975 oh so desperately want to be a part of what's happening.

Part of our culture, part of reality – part of our lives. And it translates.

There's just something so zeitgeisty and 'if Instagram was a band it would be The 1975' with these guys. The mix of melancholy and almost wanna-be-edness of like "please love me" and "let me in" and worrying about the future while also showing meticulous attention to detail when it comes to the branding and how it's perceived on the outside feels like it really captures something about our current culture with everyone feeling increasingly disconnected, yet making sure they look fucking awesome on Instagram.

Logan White of Superstream Magazine put it "There wasn’t a minute of their set that felt overproduced, or insincere — what you saw is fully the 1975 and everything they wanted you to see."

He then encourages his readers to:

In any case, I never thought I'd be writing a piece like this about The 1975, but there's something about that makes them impossible to ignore. I know, because I genuinely tried so hard for many years now; and here we are, 1500 words later as I await my upcycled The 1975 hoodie to arrive and the London date to be announced blasting UGH!.