Can a Quote-Unquote Band Drag Rock Into the Future? The 1975 Is Trying Its Hardest

LOS ANGELES — To be a young rock star in 2018 is to be racked with anxiety and self-consciousness about what it means to be a young rock star in 2018.

New ones are hardly being minted, especially within the confines of what is traditionally considered rock ’n’ roll, and live instrumentation tends not to resonate on the rap-drenched Billboard, Spotify and Apple Music charts. Rock concerts persist on a grand scale, but legacy reigns. Guitar heroes are more of a novelty than a fixture.

Matty Healy, 29, is exactly the kind of music obsessive who lives to think and talk about this kind of thing. With his flirty eyes and fashion sense, lunatic energy and history of substance abuse, he also happens to be the perfect man for the job.

“I don’t listen to rock bands,” Healy, who sings, produces and plays guitar, said last month in a sleek rented home in the Hollywood Hills strewn with designer clothes, workout equipment, instruments and pool floats.

Fine, he’ll admit, the 1975, his more-famous-than-you-think British group, is “superficially” a version of that endangered species. “Obviously I like the clean lines of four dudes with guitars,” he admitted. “I like playing with iconography and people do understand it.”

But, Healy added: “It’s been around for too long. It’s been done in so many good ways.”

The 1975, then, is designed strictly, by his edict, as a vehicle for progress. Together for more than 15 years, but successful only since 2012, the group, which started in Manchester as not much more than a teenage emo band, has developed over the course of four EPs and two albums into an intentional anomaly: a quote-unquote band that takes the playlist age’s lack of boundaries around genres as a given and aims, as its mantra goes, to create as it consumes.

“The way that I write music is that I listen to a song I love and I copy it,” Healy said, generously peppering his always self-assured statements with expletives. “And songs that I love are not songs by rock bands, unless they’re old classics.”

On “A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships,” the 1975’s third LP, out Nov. 30, Healy may have finally lived up to his declarations. Indulgent, occasionally ridiculous and often gorgeous, the album crams together Auto-Tuned vocals, catchy guitar licks, programmed drums, flashes of R&B and neo-soul, acoustic tear-jerkers, schlocky ’80s power ballads, ornate instrumental interludes, post-Drake tropical house, multiple background choirs and computerized spoken word into a cogent, 58-minute musing on addiction, fame and technology.

Written and produced entirely by Healy and his studio-whiz partner and drummer George Daniel, the music borrows from formulas the 1975 tinkered with on its first two albums, but ventures further — and more believably — afield, cementing the group as a rock band that can reference rap, cross into pop and still feel alternative.

The 1975 is not resting there. After finishing “A Brief Inquiry” in September, Healy took a weekend trip with his girlfriend and then returned immediately to the band’s temporary Los Angeles headquarters to dive into its fourth album, “Notes on a Conditional Form,” which he has promised will be released in May.

The deluge of new music, with a tour in between, not only nods to the pace of modern hip-hop and the online content flood, it also solidifies the 1975’s reputation as a fan’s band: Healy invests as much in his young and hungry followers as they do in him. “It’s not about selling stuff,” he said. “Superserve your fans or don’t. But it’s not quite good enough anymore to just have an album.”

Crammed with Easter eggs, lyrics referencing postmodernism, inside jokes and callbacks — for instance, every 1975 album begins with a variation on the same self-titled theme song — the band’s music gained a following in Britain and spread on the internet, even before anything was known about the people behind it.

Marketers as much as musicians, Healy and the rest of the 1975, which also includes guitarist Adam Hann and bassist Ross MacDonald, are meticulous about their aesthetic presentation, both online and onstage. (The band’s manager, Jamie Oborne, is a sort of unofficial fifth member, tasked with making Healy’s visions a reality.)

Building on the anonymous mystique employed early on by the Weeknd, the 1975 kept a clean black-and-white palette for its hype-building EPs and self-titled debut album before exploding into neon for its follow-up “I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It,” which debuted at No. 1 in 2016. (“The 1975” is platinum in the United States, while “I Like It” went gold, selling more than 685,000 copies, according to Nielsen.)

Born to well-known British actors Denise Welch and Tim Healy, Matty Healy had the eclectic taste of his generation, worshipping experimental rappers like Dizzee Rascal and the Streets’ Mike Skinner as much as pop-punk and screamo bands like Motion City Soundtrack and Thursday.

So while the 1975 eventually slid into the familiar role of a British It band, championed by the NME and BBC stations, Healy bristles at the narrow expectations that come with such exposure. “People are like, ‘Also listen to the Arctic Monkeys,’” he said. “No! It has nothing to do — it’s not remotely ... . We have guitars, but you might as well call us a microphone band — we have those, as well.”

“A Brief Inquiry” is another step toward shaking those associations. On the single “Love It if We Made It,” which may very well become the band’s defining song, Healy shout-raps a current events data dump that has been compared to a modern “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” (“Billy Joel, right?” Healy said. “I always thought it was INXS for some reason. Cool song.”)

Jumping from race (“selling melanin and then/suffocate the black men”) to internet culture (“poison me, daddy”) to politics (“I moved on her like a bitch/excited to be indicted”) to music (“rest in peace Lil Peep”), the song is nearly impossible to classify. In its recurring, all-caps hook, the track also provides a thesis statement for the album and maybe the 1975 as a whole: “Modernity has failed us,” Healy sings. “But I’d love it if we made it.”

The other preoccupation on the album, besides technology, is heroin.

Late last year, in the middle of writing “A Brief Inquiry,” Healy sought treatment for what he said was an on-and-off four-year addiction to heroin and benzodiazepines. The singer, who isolated himself at a ritzy clinic in Barbados, stressed how lucky he was to not have spiraled out of control. “I didn’t lose everything,” he said. “I scared the [expletive] out of everybody that I love, and that was enough for me.”

Still, the album is filled with evocative references to drugs — “collapse my veins wearing beautiful shoes,” he sings in the most sugary melody imaginable — because Healy said he felt as if he needed to get his addiction album out of the way while it was still fresh.

“If my most recent memories are afflicted by addiction, it’s probably going to be a thing,” he said, stressing that he would never want to glamorize drugs and did not use heroin intravenously. “I’m not going to talk about it for long.”

The life changes and move toward maturation for Healy, who still smokes plenty of weed and Marlboro Reds, also led to an attempt to address another crutch: ironic distance.

“I’ve been aware of the shtickiness of my repertoire, like, ‘This is the part of the song that’s supposed to be really sappy and emotional, but I’m going to say something irreverent so it becomes endearing,’” he said. “I’ve tried to be really sincere with this record.” Yet, because contradicting yourself is also a prerequisite of rock stardom, the meta qualities of Healy’s writing remain on songs like the loping R&B groove “Sincerity Is Scary,” where he sings: “I’m sure that you’re not just another girl/I’m sure that you’re gonna say that that was sexist.”

And restless as he is, Healy was already plotting his next phase before this one solidified. While “A Brief Inquiry” represents an awakening and emergence from the fog, he described “Notes on a Conditional Form,” the next album, as the 1975’s “U.K. nighttime record”: “in cars smoking weed, Burial and McDonalds and the M62 and Manchester — just England!” he said.

From a file of more than a dozen demos, Healy played a beat he described as “early Kanye,” featuring a chopped up Temptations sample, and then a bluesy guitar romp that was pure Rolling Stones. “This sounds like name-dropping, but I was on the phone to Mick Jagger,” Healy said by way of explanation. (In lyrics, Healy has described himself as “a millennial that baby boomers like.”)

The fact that both songs could potentially exist on the same album is the entire point of the 1975, the singer said, and a sign of his autonomy. “No record executive or the idea of an external influence has ever come into my life — ever,” Healy said earlier. “I’m completely uncompromised.”

The success of the experiment — the sold-out shows, hundreds of millions of online streams and the flock of devotees — is self-evident, he said, and so his leash is only getting longer. He hopes to be dragging a generation of listeners along with him.

“When it comes to the 1975, just trust me,” Healy said. “We’ve done it right so far.”