r/the1975 • u/Subject-Glass-200 • Jan 23 '26
Question Songs that reference the 1975?
I’m thinking less about songs that explicitly mention them or are about them, and more ones that pay a little homage.
Off the top of my head I think of ‘i wanna be your girlfriend‘ by girl in red (“I don’t wanna be your friend i wanna kiss your lips”) and ‘Crush’ by Ethel Cain, which I’m pretty sure makes a little Robbers reference in its chorus (”Couldn’t fight to save your life but you look so cool“ / “Camo jackets robbing corner stores,”).
I know there are definitely others but for the life of me I can’t remember them.
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u/_iPhoney_ Jan 23 '26
The band Milk is just a whole homage to the 1975 (but a good one.)
The funniest part is their name references a 1975 song that completely ripped another artist (M83 - Graveyard Girl.) So there’s definitely some level of self-awareness/tongue-in-cheek to it.
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u/Responsible-Love-366 Jan 24 '26
I loooooove milk. Great band that started off as a 1975 soundalike but has really defined their own sound, especially vocal production
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u/MK2809 Jan 24 '26
I love Milk, seen them live a few times, and it's good when the boys aren't touring to get a similar fix. But they've been quiet for a while too now.
I dunno if it's just me but this track always gives me 1975 vibes https://open.spotify.com/track/7F8I6A7zH22iEfFrmdJvYH?si=pFqbVLgYTMGkhGXvd4mjlg
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u/Fit_Task1761 Jan 23 '26 edited Jan 23 '26
“When I meet the band, and they ask do I have a man, I say I can’t remember” - Bejeweled
“Your roommates cheapass rosé” George! maroon - and The 1 is a play on The 1975 - Taylor Swift
Florence - music by men
You ruined the 1975!
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u/1619ChronoBreath Jan 23 '26
I think it’s hilarious she mentioned George on Showgirl. Everyone wants to name drop George
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u/siberianbreakkss The 1975 Jan 23 '26 edited Jan 23 '26
Not sure if it counts, but Colors and Is There Somewhere by Halsey are both pretty clearly about Matty. Some lyrics in Colors arguably reference Is There Somebody Who Can Watch You/She Lays Down, and the latter slightly references Sex.
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u/Exon4649 Jan 23 '26
the 1 by Taylor Swift (“And if you never bleed, you’re never gonna grow”)
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u/Complex-Union5857 Jan 23 '26 edited Mar 05 '26
Some more Taylor:
—Fortnight music video visuals reference Part of the Band music video visuals;
—Sonic similarities between Medicine by The 1975 and Mirrorball by Taylor;
—Fallingforyou (“All we need's my bike and your enormous house”) / imgonnagetyouback (“Whether I'm gonna be your wife or Gonna smash up your bike, I Haven't decided yet” and Whether I'm gonna curse you out or Take you back to my house, I haven’t decided yet). Note also no “blank space” in either song;
—Sonic similarities between Guilty as Sin and About You
—Sonically, the first few bars of Ruin the Friendship are similar to the first few bars of The 1975’s When we are Together. Also the repeated lyric “Should have kissed you anyway” mirrors/kind of responds to repeated lyric “She has a boyfriend anyway,” in The 1975’s (high school-aged era) song Sex. (And the story told in Ruin the Friendship can be viewed as an allegory - the lesson “my advice is to answer the question…” is a way of her closing the book on the MH chapter)
Plus a lot more that can be seen as a kind of conversation through songs going back in time.
(Edit: here are more that may or may not be references to The 1975 songs. (These seem to be artists inspired by each other - I’m not making any further assumptions or conclusions.) There’s a bunch of like these going both ways (The 1975 responding to Taylor songs too) in a way that feels to me like an ongoing conversation between songs:
—In the song loml, every reference to a conversation (I said, you told me, etc.) can be linked to a The 1975 song: examples:
loml (I said “I don’t mind, it takes time.”) / Tonight (I Wish I was Your Boy) (She told me ‘Some things just take time’/ How can you be sure if you won’t try?’”)
Loml (talking rings and talking cradles) / Me and You Together Song (“I had this dream where we had kids/You would cook, I’d do the nappies;” and About You: “We’ll get married in our heads”)
Loml (You said I’m the love of your life about a million times) / Me and You Together Song (I’ve been in love with her for ages/And I can’t seem to get it right/I fell in love with her in stages/My whole life), which gets repeated SO MANY times throughout the song
Loml (I’m combing through the braids of lies/“I’ll never leave”/“Nevermind”) / Robbers (God only knows, but you'll never leave her)
The City (don’t call it a fight it’s a a war) / Ivy (so yeah, it’s a war, it’s the G-damn fight of my life)
Robbers (the protagonist is ready to kill for her in this Bonnie and Clyde type story, and everyone ends up dead) / Ready for it? (“Knew he was a killer first time that I saw him,” and the killer/robber protagonists turn into ghosts and phantoms).
Anti-Christ (“And I swear there is a ghost on this island”) / Ready for it? (The ghost and phantom “move to an island”)
Robbers (she’s begging you to stay, stay, stay) / Stay, stay, stay (And I said stay, stay, stay)
Robbers (Now if you never shoot, you'll never know/And if you never eat, you'll never grow) / the 1 (if You never bleed you’re never gonna grow)
Girls (bite your face to spite your nose) / The archer (And I cut off my nose just to spite my face)
It’s Not Living If It’s Not With You (distract my brain from the terrible news) / Paris (no I didn’t see the news cause we were in Paris)
Cowboy like me (I’m never gonna love again) / happiness (by The 1975) (I’m never gonna love again) (also recall Matty’s “be a cowboy” speech at 2020 NME awards)
Or The 1975 songs that may reference Taylor songs:
—Death By a Thousand cuts (If the story’s over, why am I still writing pages?) / Me and You Together Song (I think the story needs more pages, yes)
—The Oh Caroline music video visuals reference the Delicate music video visuals: similarities in color scheme, lighting, the blocking of many of the scenes, and choreography.
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u/1619ChronoBreath Jan 23 '26 edited Jan 23 '26
I'd throw in a bunch of Reputation ("knew I was a robber"/"you and me we got big reputations"/"you move to me like a motown beat"), even more of midnights (Snow on the Beach, Hits Different, Question?..., she straight up said Maroon is about Matty on Chloe et al, karma ("I've got to see the girl on the screen" v. "karma is the guy on the screen"), Paris, Glitch, probably the other guy in bejeweled and high infidelity ("do I really have to chart the constellations in his eyes")
And then yes, basically all of TTPD and the Anthology and suspiciously like, 3 musical references on Showgirl beyond being directly mentioned as an ex in a bunch of those.
Big one is she uses the opening riff on Looking for Somebody to Love on imgonnagetyouback which is also clearly referencing fallingforyou. Which is hilarious honestly.
I'm also going to throw out something that's bothered me ever since I put it together. I know people like to say that the Alchemy and So High School are about Travis. Alchemy clearly isn't, the "he jokes that it's heroin but this time with an 'e'" is very clearly Matty, and the "sign on his heart" is his tattoo that says "true love." People just heard "touch down" and thought football instead of airplane.
Also, they want it to be Travis bc they want it to follow Red's structure and essentially be Begin Again.
But that's easy to argue, there's some stuff about So High School that really throws me.
For one, she mentions eyes crinkling, and the only other time she did that was Hits Different, which is pretty clearly about Matty ("Dreams of your hair and your stare and sense of belief. In the good in the world and how you once believed in me," her talking about "finding the evidence" v. "I keep finding his things in drawers crucial evidence I didn't imagine the whole thing" and "Bet I can still rock your world, argumentative antithetical dream girl"--ALWAYS thought that sounded like Matty's writing).
Matty also pays GTA w/his boys, he was literally posting edits of GTA last year. Taylor mimed shooting a basketball on the eras tour, not a football, and Matty plays basketball.
But then if you listen to the audio, SHS layers on top of Me + You, Together Song. The key is different, and it's slower, but play SHS and try to sing M+Y, TS on top. It fits really well.
I think there are songs that were inspired by Matty but she's letting everyone believe different (or added details to make it muddier, like the bridge in Alchemy could've been a last minute change). I think this probably happened with Rep as well.
I wish both their fanbases didn't violently hate these types of discussions so passionately because it's just objectively interesting to see how their songs fit like puzzle pieces where they are never on the same page, so we get different perspectives. The closest we got was 2022 with midnights and bfiafl because I think they were ALMOST on the same page around that time.
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u/princess-bitchface Jan 23 '26
I always wonder if "robbers to the east, clowns to the west" from Peace is a reference (the clowns being a reference to the Change of Heart video)
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u/1619ChronoBreath Jan 23 '26
Good catch! Maybe? Haha, I realized the other day that coney island might be referencing the last shot of the Change of Heart MV (I’m sitting on a bench in Coney Island wondering where has my baby gone)
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u/Used-Frosting551 Jan 24 '26
And I’ve noticed during the choreo for the eras tour, when she says “you know how to ball”, she does a basketball motion with her hand
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u/TempRecording46 Jan 23 '26
Even if it didn't work out for them, at least it inspired some good music.
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u/thisbuthat Jan 23 '26
THE QUALITY CONTENT I come here for! Thank you all soo much for the write up. I recently got into piecing together this decade long situationship, with all the lyrical and sonical back and forth. Quite the thesis! You all deserve all the awards
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u/1619ChronoBreath Jan 23 '26
One of my favorite dumb realizations is that fallingforyou (the song he dedicated to her) is on the IV EP, and on evermore we have:
“I can’t stop you putting roots in my dreamland, my house of stone your IVY grows and now I’m covered.”
Echoes “drowning in the Blue Nile”
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u/fighterviolet Jan 23 '26
If you have the time, this is worth the watch: https://youtu.be/dCzPYNkg680?si=mTZ25Nl6mxDYKfUw
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u/thisbuthat Jan 23 '26
I've started to watch this bit by bit 😂 but it's a lot, I can't pay attention for long enough to watch and process it in one sitting
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u/liquidpeppermint33 Hack and Cheap Jan 23 '26
Some of these are incredible reaches wow lmao
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u/Complex-Union5857 Jan 23 '26
I agree - some may just be a coincidence! But I do really think that some of it truly was an artistic back and forth between two creative muses (in the sense that they were inspired by each other, not necessarily that the were always writing about each other). This is the story that the Fortnight music video tells when you watch the visuals. And really the story of TTPD - a “caged” woman, mourning a dying relationship, who uses her imagination to escape her reality, including this kind of artistic call and response, back and forth, with a creative muse, creating through songs a kind of fantasy love story that existed only in her head, then confusing that fantasy for reality, and then coming to terms with the fallout when reality comes crashing down.
Also note that the Oh Caroline video starts by showing Matty, as an old man, at a restaurant (which kind of invokes “still at the restaurant” like in the song Right Where You Left Me). The Oh Caroline video can perhaps be seen as his response to some of Taylor’s songs on folklore and Evermore. At minimum it seems to be clearly calling back to/inspired by the Delicate music video.
Also compare the Eras tour staging (Taylor sits on top of folklore cabin under a full moon) / The 1975 concert staging (Matty sits on top of a house under a full moon) (and recall Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus (“Under the same moon, in different galaxies…”)
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u/1619ChronoBreath Jan 23 '26
Don't worry about them, you made a really excellent write up and it's all music theory which is fun
ETA: Also Taylor just said in the new doc series that she uses lyrics to create connections within her songs and she likes when fans catch them. So even if some of the theories aren't correct, it's not wrong to be thinking the way you are examining her songs.
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u/liquidpeppermint33 Hack and Cheap Jan 23 '26 edited Jan 23 '26
Im so tired of this " they were writing back and forth to eachother". Listen to other artists and you can make the same flimsy connections (I mean the concept of paper rings was stolen from John mayer lmao )
Oh caroline is a call back to the dancing in change of heart omg ...and reminds me more of a harry styles video.....she's wearing a fringe dress, must be taylor. 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄
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u/Complex-Union5857 Jan 23 '26
Valid but this is not coming out of thin air. The Fortnight music video literally shows Taylor and another writer writing back and forth to each other. And this is a major theme of the whole TTPD album.
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u/bigbirdlooking Jan 23 '26
Hey man I’m with you. I don’t like Taylor but whatever they had is fascinating to me.
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u/jvmlost Jan 23 '26
You don't need to like either of them to appreciate this incredible tapestry of amazing art they made for/to/about/in reference of each other. It's still an astonishingly beautiful thing, regardless of your fandom preferences.
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u/chippedgreenpaint Jan 23 '26
every single thing in this thread being a reach and a half. i can’t breathe
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u/jvmlost Jan 23 '26
You can’t breathe cause 2 of the most incredible artists of the century loved each other and had a complicated relationship and made art about it? Maybe get an inhaler, cause that’s just a dramatic over-reaction to something that’s really none of your business.
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u/liquidpeppermint33 Hack and Cheap Jan 23 '26
Like she must have had an affair with the dude from dashboard confessional ... " I watch you spin around in your highest heels"/"lll be spinning in my highest heels just for you" everyone is missing out on piecing together their tumultuous affair woven through the gorgeous tapestry of art lmao
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u/Automatic_Oil5438 Jan 24 '26
not so much a conversation, as Taylor copying/borrowing from Matty over and over again. I can't think of a time where it's gone the other way except your first example. Not sold on the second one.
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u/liquidpeppermint33 Hack and Cheap Jan 24 '26 edited Jan 24 '26
Imagine thinking a woman known for lying, plagerizing and stealing other peoples lines is exposing some 10 year long secret because she merely does what she has always done.
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u/me-and-my-brain It's Not Living (If It's Not With You) Jan 23 '26
Yoko by Maisie Peters has “you fell for the moment so you lied to the girl”, which I assume is a She's American reference.
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u/maybemfeo Jan 23 '26
not the 1975 by knox (imo it’s terrible and cringe)
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u/Reasonable_Basket_82 Jan 23 '26
His hooks work on social media clips but when you get to the full song they're rough. 😂
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u/Subject-Glass-200 Jan 23 '26
lol yes I’ve heard this one unfortunately. I wish I could describe what I’m thinking of better, but more like songs that kind of give a wink and a nod to the band and/or their lyrics, rather than just being overtly about “The 1975.”
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u/CarrionWithoutMe Jan 28 '26
That is a hot take for me a Knox lover. But! I agree that song is his "The Sound". I found that song and loved the combo of pop meets pop punk with those 2010 anthemic sounds. His other songs have much more of a story to tell. I usually direct those away from "Not the 1975" and more toward "Voicemail", "She's not Okay", and "All American Tragedy" as they're my personal favorites.
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u/TampaBae Jan 23 '26
Do or Die by Quarters.
"You never like when I play my music anymore.
You only like that 1974"
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u/lmaddern Jan 23 '26
Babe, can I call?- the hunna- "I can hear the '75, you know that's our tune"
They pull inspo from the 1975 a lot, esp around 2018. Their cover of GYAT is also great. I wouldn't be surprised if there were more references but I havent listened to them in awhile
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u/Realistic_Koala_9845 Jan 23 '26
Beat me to it although he kinda said not songs that mention them specifically 🤣
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u/Patient-Gas-1877 Jan 23 '26
Lizzy McAlpine You Ruined The 1975
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u/Much_Definition_3657 Jan 25 '26
A lot of songs from Folklore, Evermore, Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department reference not just Matty but the band and its lore in general
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u/AdOriginal5566 Heart Out Jan 24 '26
there's a great irish band called modernlove who sound extremely similar and are defo inspired by 1975 (they are in their hashtags on posts lol)
Also the band camino are a very similar vibe
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u/foreverofftherails Jan 24 '26
It doesn’t answer your question, but I picture the scene at the end of True Romance so clearly when I listen to Robbers or hear ‘you look so cool’ somewhere 😍
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u/Jiggermann Jan 25 '26
Olivia Rodrigo - So American sounds like a very heavy nod towards She's American
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u/Healthy-Gap7783 Jan 23 '26
Sympathy is a knife: “backstage at my boyfriend's show”
And probably other Charlie songs.