The 1975 and the Courage to Be Sincere

The most radical thing The 1975 do is refuse the armour of irony. In an era where every artist is required to be arch, detached, and vaguely embarrassed by their own feelings, they keep showing up with their heart fully exposed, singing “I love you” without a wink.

I think about this when I write READMEs.

The ironic default

Irony is a defence mechanism. If you make the joke first, no one can laugh at you. The same instinct that makes an artist add “kind of” to every statement makes a developer write a README that apologises for existing: “Just a tiny script, probably useless, YMMV, don’t judge me.”

The 1975’s early records are full of this — self-deprecation, jokes, a band pretending not to care. But listen closely and you hear the opposite: songs that take love, addiction, and the apocalypse completely seriously. The joke is a door; sincerity is the house.

Sincerity as a build step

I’ve started treating sincerity as a technical requirement. When I write a changelog, I say what actually happened: “This version fixes the bug where the calendar showed the wrong month. Sorry about that.” When I write a README, I say what the tool is for and what it isn’t. No armour.

The response has been consistently good. People trust tools that tell the truth about themselves. It turns out “honest” is a feature, and it ships.

The chorus

“I don’t want your body, I want what’s in your head” — from If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know). I keep coming back to this line. It’s the whole argument for building things with care: the tools we make are conversations between minds. The user isn’t a metric; they’re a mind with a problem.

The brave thing isn’t being clever. The brave thing is saying the true thing and letting it be true. The 1975 taught me that — at unreasonable volume, in a car, probably while a build was running.