Just days before they send fans worldwide into a feeding frenzy by dropping their obsessively anticipated third album A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships, English pop mavericks The 1975 have tipped their hat to their legion of followers in New Zealand by bringing their tour to Auckland for one massive show.
The show will mark the band’s first trip to New Zealand since January 2016, when front-man Matty Healy and his troops were just about to release their wildly popular and critically adored second record I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful yet So Unaware of It.
Certified Platinum in the UK, Gold in the US and hitting Number 1 in countries all over the world, I Like It...’ was best described by Drowned in Sound as a “bold body of work that sounds effortless and odd and sophisticated.”
Hailed as 2016’s NME Album of the Year in 2016, it skyrocketed The 1975 into rare air occupied only by some of the biggest bands in the world. Tracks like ‘Love Me’, ‘The Sound’ and ‘Somebody Else’ (just three of the staggering seven singles taken from the record) showcased the bands knack for razor sharp pop hooks which frame Healy’s impassioned vocals and dramatic lyricisms with inch-perfect precision.
Preceded by quixotic first single ‘Give Yourself A Try’, A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships arrives amid the band’s Music for Cars era: a period of performance and release that will encapsulate A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships as well as 2019’s upcoming fourth record Notes on a Conditional Form – slated to arrive in May 2019.
If that sounds a bit complicated: it’s really nothing when compared to the campaign of mystery, innuendo and misinformation that has surrounded The 1975 since they wrapped up touring commitments on I Like It...
Forever keeping the fans guessing, the quartet has repeatedly teased new material, tossed out cryptic comments, broken up and reformed (although this may have been a joke), hidden zip files in posters, changed release dates and basically done everything in their significant power to whip up the tumbling waves of anticipation beating down on them on the eve of the album’s release.
All going to plan then, the 1975 will hit Kiwi shores in 2019 with two albums of new material to show off and they will do so as a band at the absolute peak of their powers.
