It’s fair to say that 2013 was one hell of a year for The 1975. With a sell-out coming up this month, 2014 is starting off pretty sweetly too. Now the indie pop quartet and new darlings of the airwaves tell David Vincent about their “totally mind blowing” ascent.

This time last year, The 1975 were putting in the hard yards touring the country’s cosier gig rooms. Hotly tipped, but far from a household name, February 2013 saw them take to the stage at The Institute’s 300-capacity upstairs space, The Temple. Fast forward a year and they’re preparing to a sell-out crowd of more than 3,000 at the O2 Academy, just one many sold out shows at venues across the UK. The Mancunian combo’s rise from the relative obscurity of Manchester’s music scene to nation-hopping bona fide popstar pin-ups has been swift, and frontman Matt Healy confesses he’s had little time to seriously consider all they’ve achieved.

“You know, it’s hard to remember everything without a cognitive jolt, so much has happened,” he says. “We did 250 gigs last year, and that’s everything from supporting The Rolling Stones to the entire UK festival season. There was this massive acceleration in our popularity, you could see our band getting bigger every day, it was changing on a daily basis.

“Reading/Leeds festival was amazing as was cracking America. But there have been so many highlights it’s so difficult to pick just one without negating others. If you imagine being in a band, then you get to play as many shows as we have after being together for so long…it’s totally mind-blowing.”

While it might appear as if The 1975 appeared from nowhere fully formed, Matt (vocals/guitar), Adam Hann (guitar), George Daniel (drums) and Ross MacDonald (Bass) had been busily beavering away together for over a decade with little impact.

“When we started out we were crazy little kids,” says Matt, the son of acting parents Denise Welch (Loose Women, Waterloo Road) and Tim Healy (Auf Wiedersehen Pet, Benidorm). “We sounded like the Dead Kennedys one day, the next like Explosions In The Sky, but our love for music never changed.”

Other musical loves cited by the quartet include Michael Jackson, Roberta Flack, Prince, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, 80s art pop and 90s R’n’B music.

“That’s the music that informs us, definitely, but it’s difficult to say what we sound like or how we sound like those acts,” Matt reckons. “Most obviously I think there’s evidence of 90s R’n’B and 80s big production, that Trevor Horn-ish production. Peter Gabriel’s So, Paul Simon’s Graceland, Michael Jackson’s Bad…[and] there’s a lot of Prince in our recordings, but all that space is also filled in with Talking Heads, My Bloody Valentine, Sigur Ros, Brian Eno, it’s a real composite of pop, funk, ambient, soul…”

The result is a sound that never neatly sits into a simple pigeonhole or genre.

“I think we’ve got quite a post-modern attitude to the creation of music and it’s split a lot of people down the middle because they don’t know how to take it,” says Matt.

Over the last decade, the band have changed names numerous times – with Big Sleep, Drive Like I Do and Slowdown among their previous monikers – and played plenty of smaller gigs, supporting acts like Little Comets and One Night Only, but mostly they learned their craft by hard graft.

“We didn’t have a CD…we didn’t do anything. We just made music for ourselves or our cool friends and toured with bands we knew. Our manager just let us get better. It was only when we changed our name to The 1975 that we decided to put an EP out – we made a film about it,” Matt says. “James, who did our original videos for Sex, he’s been filming us since we were 17, and filmed all those [record label] rejections. It’s quite funny…it’s quite funny to see us worry so much, quite cute,” he laughs. “It’s almost Spinal Tap!”

With a name inspired by a scribbling found in the pages of an old second hand book which read: ‘1st June The 1975’, the band’s first release was the EP Facedown in late 2012. Sex, Music For Cars and IV EPs followed with tracks from earlier incarnations re-recorded (check out Drive Like I Do’s Chocolate on YouTube), and within a matter of months, The 1975 are flooring festival audiences, supporting stadium-filling bands like Muse and The Stones, and scoring a number one album with their alarmingly confident, breezy and hook-laden self-titled debut. And yes, it looks like they’ve even cracked the States too.

“That sounds like I’m being a dick,” Matt says referring to his earlier statement about their US success, “but in regards to us playing America, we played the Academy in Manchester for three nights (Jan 6-8, 2014), but we also sold out Terminal 5 in New York and venues in San Francisco which are the same size of venues that we play in Manchester and London.”

The band are due back Stateside for two months after dates in New Zealand, Japan (“things have taken off there too”) and the UK, including a date at the Royal Albert Hall. As to why they’ve been so quick to find US audiences swooning, Matt thinks their teen-appeal could be a significant factor.

“Partially [it’s] due to the power of the internet and the globalisation of teenagers, and I can say that having seen teenagers from around the world, they’re all the same. Obviously, there’s cultural differences, but if you take teenagers from Eastern Europe or southern California, they’re all teenagers! But it’s the music, I think, it’s feel-good, there’s a juxtaposition of images, there’s darker elements, that’s what we’re about.

“I’m just talking here, trying to figure it out myself,” he continues, “we’re quite geographically ambiguous as a band, and there are not many bands on the radio making modern pop music. There are so many solo acts, but that classic band line-up? I don’t know,” he laughs, “I’m just trying to figure it out.”

One thing for certain is that they’ve come a long way in a very short time, something Matt is regularly aware of.

“I was just thinking that the people who do our live light show are the same people who did Nine Inch Nails’,” he says with a shocked sigh.

“I was [recently] walking into this great big rehearsal studio we got to rehearse for the three nights at Brixton and the sold out Royal Albert Hall show and I remembered that just over a year ago we were rehearsing in my mum’s garage for a show at The Barfly. And when we played downstairs at Sound Control, in Manchester, there were about 150 people there. That was about 13 months ago and I could not believe it. I nearly cried!”

He mentions the three-night run at Manchester Academy and the queues of fans who arrived at the venue before lunchtime each day with both shock and pride.

“That doesn’t really happen for bands, it doesn’t really happen. That messes with your head. You imagine it all when you’re in a band but you never think it’ll actually happen to you, and then you’re suddenly presented with all these statistics and facts.”

You could say it’s mind-blowing.

“It’s TOTALLY mind-blowing.”

The 1975 are live at the O2 Academy, Birmingham on February 12 with support from The Neighbourhood and Wolf Alice. Tickets are now sold out.