In the front room of a smartly-decorated, four-storey east London townhouse, Sharpies squeak on glossy paper as three members of U.K. band The 1975 scrawl their names on the sleeves of pre-ordered copies of their second album, the ludicrously titled minor masterpiece I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It. Across the hallway, in his kitchen, that album’s architect Matty Healy puts on the kettle and makes two cups of tea. When he’s done, Matty presents me with a choice. “Black mug, or yellow mug?” It’s like being in a homier version of The Matrix. I choose yellow. “That’s the right answer,” is his mysterious response.

Injecting anxiety into something as mundane as tea delivery is a very Matty-from-The-1975 thing to. It won’t have gone unnoticed by The 1975’s rapidly accumulated and unusually engaged fan community, who helped the band’s tracks like “Chocolate” and “Girls” dominate international airwaves, but this 26-year-old isn’t like most frontmen in most bands, and The 1975 are not your average British guitar four-piece. Their image is as multi-layered and wilfully disorientating as their music, which genre-hops between rock, R&B, electro, and '80s FM rock.

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But front and centre, there’s Matty Healy. Some artists talk like they’re reading from a script; Matty speaks with utter conviction of thoughts that seem to be a work in progress, peppering his sentences with phrases like “postmodern,” “meta,” and “post-ironic.” His focus is contagious, and persuasive to the point of being faintly intoxicating. Matty has a romantic view of that long-gone era when artists were untouchable entities — when seeing Michael Jackson at London’s Wembley Stadium was the nearest he’d ever get to his existence being acknowledged by his hero. Equally he knows that the internet, which he blames for blowing the lid off the whole pop mystification game, has been integral to his own success. Using a highly stylized social media strategy that first centred on monochrome imagery and oblique, idiosyncratic missives quite at odds with most new pop acts’ ‘selfie with Demi Lovato’ approach, The 1975 have navigated a strange but charismatic path—sonically and stylistically—between those two eras.

Non-superfans may find Matty’s onstage persona a little banal—that particular character is a preening, pouting, shirtless rock god in the tried and tested Mick Jagger vein—but today, in his kitchen and on his own territory, he bears a closer resemblance to the complex personality identifiable in his songwriting. His layered, claustrophobic lyrics reveal a man obsessed with fear and fragility, success and failure, endlessly looking for answers about himself and the pop-culture world he uncomfortably inhabits. In typically perverse fashion, Matty is more interesting and convincing when he’s sitting in his kitchen underneath a chalkboard bearing a reminder about which night to take out the trash, than he is when he’s actually trying to be a pop star.