“Unless you’re Glassjaw, Converge, Refused or further than that, heavy is f**king lame”: Matty Healy says The 1975 can “do heavy all day long” – here’s why they don’t
While broadly labelled as pop-rock, The 1975’s catalogue is filled with further-reaching influences from synth-pop and indie rock to country and beyond. That said, the band aren’t interested in taking their music in a heavier direction, primarily because, in frontman Matty Healy’s opinion, it’s already been done with an impact they wouldn’t be able to match.
In a new and wide-ranging conversation with Joshua Citarella for the Doom Scroll podcast, Healy – an often divisive figure, anyway – attempts to explain why The 1975 were “hated” by some music listeners when they emerged onto the scene.
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He says it was because The 1975 were a “band”, and “every band that got signed over us was a band that was essentially doing an impression of the Arctic Monkeys”.
Healy goes on: “So what they were saying is, a band has to be from an economically deprived place in order to have authenticity. It needs to be kind of gritty. It needs to reference, at the time, the kind of the aesthetics of post punk. So like, you know, all of your Joy Division, industrialisation, Thatcherism, brutalism, all those kinds of things. And we just didn’t adhere to any of that…
“We were hated for essentially being a band that was the opposite of heavy. And I was like, well, after [1998’s] The Shape of Punk to Come came out – [it was] the last punk album – it knew that.”
He goes on: “Refused – they split up because they were politically so different… And in their last show, the cops came. It makes me want to cry; I get chills thinking about it. The cops came in, and all of their fans turned around and shouted the line from Rather Be Dead: ‘I’d rather be alive.’ And they’re just shouting, ‘I’d rather be alive. I’d rather be alive,’ as Refused physically disbanded.
“So when I saw that, I thought, ‘I can’t do something heavy that touches on that.’ Because for me… unless you’re Glassjaw, Converge, Refused, or further than that, heavy is fucking lame.
“So the reason we’re not heavy – and we can do heavy all day long – but we’re not because it wasn’t new. We wanted to be something quite new.”
Watch the full conversation between Matty Healy and Joshua Citarella below. The above can be heard from 1:10:30:
The post “Unless you’re Glassjaw, Converge, Refused or further than that, heavy is f**king lame”: Matty Healy says The 1975 can “do heavy all day long” – here’s why they don’t appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
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