THEY’RE one of the hottest alternative bands around. The 1975 has captivated audiences with its eclectic sounds and next week’s gig at the BIC is a sell out.

But it’s not been an easy ride. Before the band’s frontman Matty Healy could go forth and conquer the world, he had the small matter of doing battle with himself first.

As one of the band’s inner circle says: “Matthew has what every great frontman has: a massive ego, and extremely low self-worth.

“That’s great for a frontman; for a human being’s mental health, though, it’s debilitating. His confidence is sky-high but wafer-thin. He has amazing self-belief and resilience, and a huge work ethic, but all of that is shadowed by a darker side.”

Their manager, Jamie Oborne, remembers only too clearly the battle to get record companies to give the band a chance.

“There’s still this misconception out there that they had it easy, that they signed a massive record deal and immediately had a hit single.

“The truth is different. No one wanted to sign them – no one. Labels, agents, publishers, none of them wanted to know.

“I tried for about four years to get someone to help us facilitate and support our vision. All I was met with was, ‘We don’t understand them; they sound too different from one song to the next. Radio will hate them’.”

When the band’s self-titled debut album – released on the independent label Dirty Hit, which Jamie had set up specifically for The 1975 – entered the UK chart at number 1 in September 2013, there was certainly a feeling of vindication.

More importantly, it cemented in their minds the sense that, if the band were to mean anything, they had to trust their instincts and resist outside interference.

Matty explains: “The historic adherence to one type of anything is so pointless, and it’s not something that ever enters my mind. If I’m inspired by something, my attitude is, ‘I’m taking that’.

If anyone has a problem with that, well, I don’t care – nobody cares about that sort of thing anymore. Besides, in 2016, everything has been done. You just have to try and do it better, which is what we’ve done. My generation consumes music in this completely non-linear way, and we reflect that because that’s how we create.

But now the band has made it, the thought of being aloof pop icons inaccessible from their fans behind a velvet rope, is an anathema to them.

“Why would you want to feel above that? So much of the power in what we’re trying to do comes from their emotional involvement in and understanding of the way I feel things.

“I’ve never dramatised or fetishised the reality of addiction or flirted with the idea of suicide and subjects like that, but nor have I shirked them, and I think that’s why they relate to us. “I’m convinced that’s what people really want to invest in when it comes to music, something they can genuinely identify with. Otherwise, what? It’s a backdrop to our lives? Music is more than that. It’s everything.”

That attitude informs every note and word on the new album, I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It. It’s as if everything the band has ever done has been leading up to this point.

From the opening bars of The 1975, a reworked version of the track that opened their debut album, the album is a thrilling affirmation of what makes this band so defiantly individual and indifferent to the tired old formulas of the pop machine.

When The 1975 first emerged in 2012 with the Facedown EP, it was instantly clear that this was a band that were going to be controversial.

Their sound was unashamedly glamorous (one of Matty’s favourite words), the lyrics heart-on-sleeve, spill-your-guts confessional, their music brazenly diverse.

And, in their frontman, the band possessed a singer who saw live performance as a precipice just asking to be jumped from.

The four school friends who formed a band 13 years ago south of Manchester, may be unusually accessible to their fans, but they retain a fierce, circle-the-wagons mentality when it comes to their dealings with the music industry.

“We are very much a product of our environment,” says Matty. “We’re like brothers, we really are. For 13 years we’ve been in the same room together. The band has always been the nucleus of everything.”

This mentality is also the product of their unhappy experiences, in their early days, of record label indifference.

As Matty is quick to admit that recording sessions were often fraught and always intense, though they were joyous, too.

In the early stages of recording, both he and George were, he says, “in different ways, in a very bad place”. Years of solid touring had taken their toll, and there were moments where the pair struggled with the burden of creating a follow-up to their debut.

“George and I are like brothers, we had never left each other’s side. We complete each other. And my problems at that time separated us a little bit.

“It catalysed the troubles that he had and solidified all of the issues that I was having in return, and it became this really dark time. And born out of that was The Ballad of Me and My Brain.

Lyrically, the new album reflects the upheavals, triumphs, traumas and losses in Matty’s life over the past three years.

His lyrics are alternately catty, tender, merciless, cocksure, self-recriminatory, pleading, narcissistic and remorseful. – a distillation of the conversation that goes on unceasingly in his head.

“I think our fans understand the vulnerability because it’s very much their vulnerability as well.

“They recognise this weird loner who flirts with these things and gets it wrong. I used to think, ‘If I’m successful I am going to be able to go into all of these cool rooms, and I’ll just be one of them, but I’m not, I’m still me and still an idiot and I still get nervous about stuff and change my personality a little bit to talk to somebody new.

“Have you spent any time with modern pop stars recently? You stand there and think, ‘You’ve got a beautiful face, but what have you got to say? And can you really be best friends with every popular person on Instagram?’”

But now they are firmly in the spotlight band manager Jamie Oborne says it will be interesting to see what happens now.

“Matty’s been looking inwards for the entire year, and now, all of a sudden, his gaze is outwards, and he has to become what he sees as a salesman.

“So there’s that stark duality. He labours over his art so much, the whole band does, that we all struggle to be in the present.

“He lives his life by extremes; he’s either totally committed, or a chronic procrastinator. He judges himself extremely harshly.

“The further we go, and no matter how many opportunities he gets to bash away at what he always calls ‘the pursuit of excellence’, he will always want to better himself, to make the band better.”

What is clear though is that The 1975 has made an album of breathtaking scope and ambition which will come to define 2016, and be looked back on as a game-changer.

*The 1975 play at the BIC on Wednesday December 21.