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I spent Friday night in The 1975’s living room. Or, rather, I spent Friday night in The 1975’s “living room,” a place that on another night would just be Seattle’s WAMU Theater. In contrast with the band’s last tour, which offered performances in front of massive and sometimes text-heavy screens and shiny LED lights, the stage setup of this new one replicates the look and feel of the inside of a house. About a dozen lamps assisted the stage lights. A handful of couches and coffee tables gave the band’s members places to sometimes sit for solos, a window or two an opening to gaze wistfully from. To the audience member’s left, a staircase spiraled up to nowhere; to their right, a couple walls shaped the “foyer” of the “home,” topped off with a ceiling fan and artificial roof the band’s frontman and primary songwriter, Matty Healy, inevitably climbed on top of to literally take a song’s emotion higher.

The “intimate evening”-style setup of this 1975 one is typically presented earnestly, a gesture to authenticity and a kind of between-friends camaraderie. But for a band like The 1975 — whose songs lyrically waver between being the sharpest and most on-the-nose among those offered by current-day acts when on the subject of the ever-increasing absurdities of internet culture and public performance — a sense we’re being winked at feels as conspicuous as the untouched bookcases filling out the stage’s background. Flanked by a pair of jumbotrons, The 1975 seemed to want you to notice the objective preposterousness of the gimmick when it’s employed on an act performing on this big a stage — to wonder if this constructed living-room togetherness becomes realer or faker through the everyday-routine repetition demanded by touring.  

Read the full review on 425.