It’s a girl thing

The teenage girls are often right. They were right about Sinatra and they were right about Elvis. They were right about the Beatles and the Stones. They were right, too, about the 1975, whose emergence in 2013 playing tuneful and accessible pop-rock with unusually self-questioning lyrics was driven by a large and voluble following among those teenage girls. Naturally, that led a swathe of male critics to write them off. One dismissed them on the baffling grounds that their songs were ‘ridiculously catchy’, as if that were a bad thing; the NME proclaimed them the worst band in the world

Six years on, the critics have caught up. The 1975’s third album, A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, was greeted with reviews that suggested they had more or less brought together the best bits of War and Peace, Abbey Road and Citizen Kane. These days the NME would rather smash its collective face into the wall than suggest that anything about the 1975 is less than perfect.