The chart legacy and influence of The 1975's debut album

Some debut albums are messy. It's easy to understand why; any act when creating their first complete record should ask themselves one question; who am I? And following this; what do I want to say? How do I communicate this? 

Debut albums are important. You only get one of them, and some artists struggle to contain all the ideas, hopes and dreams for their future in one singular body of work. Some artists never get there, their discography is an ever-evolving thing, with their focus getting more and more refined with each record. But some debut albums are different. They come out of the gate as fully formed statements, definitive in their look, sound and feel. 

This is the case for The 1975's self-titled debut album, which celebrates its 10-year anniversary this week. In one album, Matty Healy, George Daniel, Adam Hann and Ross MacDonald seemed to intuitively understand who they were and what they want to say. It still stands as the ultimate distillation of their potential as a band, and a definitive flag in the ground for a new age in British pop music. 

It helps that The 1975, from when they were officially formed in 2012, were in a constant state of flux and discovery. They'd technically been together for a decade before this, first getting together in 2002 and recording under a variety of names; Talkhouse, The Slowdown and Drive Like I Do. Several tracks that make up their debut album - like The City and Sex - had existed for years prior. One thing was always constant in their work, even if the name wasn't; a commitment to blurring the lines between pop, indie and rock and a crunchy aesthetic that was incredibly polished, but also full of grit and grunge. 

MORE: See where all of the 1975's singles and albums have charted in the UK

The 1975 first came to life through a series of four EPs; Facedown, Sex, Music For Cars and IV. They were exploratory and ambient, riffing on groups like The Cure, Big Pink and the Strokes. They were messy, yes, but focused towards an end goal. That end goal was their debut album proper, 16 tracks that exist on the sound of living in a small town and wanting to get out. Like all great pop music, there's a desperation knitted deep into the album. 

You can hear it on the electronic rush on the album's second track The City, a call to arms to all the teenagers who have grown up out in the sticks, in the middle of nowhere, and have to pack up and leave to make something of themselves, getting lost in the cacophony and noise of cities like Manchester and London. When you step into an arena like that, life comes at you fast. It's big and it's dangerous, and you can never go back.

The cracked mirror image to The City is Robbers, which hews closer to stark indie rock more than any other song on the album, the tale of a sordid, toxic relationship but could just as easily be read as a reaction against the suffocating parameters of small town life, where you have to pull off a heist to escape in the first place. 

The 1975's centrepiece, though, is and always will be Sex, a magnificent, shuddering mall-pop anthem which takes in all the influences the boys called on during this period - 80s synth-pop, the rise of emo-rock, Britpop lyricism - and perfects it. 

MORE: The 1975's Official biggest songs in the UK

The 1975's release was preceded by the release of Sex and Chocolate as singles. Chocolate itself was the first 1975 song to really reach a wider audience; if you were listening to Radio 1 at any point during 2013, you were going to hear it, and it became the band's first charting single in the UK, eventually peaking at Number 19 (although ask anyone of a certain age and they'll probably assume it charted much higher). 

In its first week of release, The 1975 would debut at Number 1 on the Official Albums Chart outselling its nearest competition (Nine Inch Nails, fact fans) 2:1. This would kickstart an incredibly successful chart history for the band; The 1975 are the members of a very rare club on the Official Chart, with all of their studio albums having reached Number 1 in the UK.

As of right now, their tally of five Number 1 albums  -  The 1975, I like it when you sleep for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it, A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships, Notes on a Conditional Form and Being Funny in a Foreign Language - sees them pull equal with Ed Sheeran (!). 

According to Official Charts Company data, The 1975 has, as of today, brought in more than 791,000 chart units in the UK and is officially the 1975's best-selling album here, including over 255,000 physical purchases and 228,000 digital downloads.

Across the 16 tracks on its standard edition, it has combined streams totaling a massive 503 million. Unsurprisingly, Chocolate is the most-streamed track of the album in general, with lifetime streams of 136 million. 

A decade on from the release of their debut album, The 1975 have continued to experiment with their sound and image on an almost fanatical level. The obsession with how they and their music are perceived has become a running theme in the band's work, and you could link this to the mixed reception their first album received from critics when it first dropped. But The 1975 wasn't made for them. It was made for people like me, who came to age in 2013 and now, somehow, write about music professionally. We got it at the time, and we still got it now.

And 10 years later, The 1975 still stands up. Last year, the similarly controversial British musician Yungblud told us The 1975, along with Charli XCX's True Romance,  were some of the defining records of his youth. You can still hear echoes of this record everywhere. 

Sometimes, you get it right on the first try.