3 things and 16 songs you missed from The 1975 at ACL Fest in Austin

“Saturday night bangers, let’s (expletive) go,” The 1975 frontman Matty Healy said during the band’s Austin City Limits Music Festival headline set.

The band indeed (expletive) went, as they inherited the Honda stage from Weekend 1 Saturday headliner Shania Twain and turned in a sonically thrilling set cast in strobe lights and Healy’s signature scuzzy charisma.

Fans first got hooked on the British band when breakout singles “Sex” and “Chocolate” emerged in the early 2010s. The boys from Manchester — singer Healy, guitarist Adam Hann, bassist Ross MacDonald and drummer George Daniel — blew up. All five of their studio albums went No. 1 in their native country; four of them got in the top 10 stateside. The band’s become an influential pop-rock sensation, in an era when bands that play rock music are not always top o’ the pops. They even inspired a synthy, emo-indebted indie subgenre that NME dubbed “Healywave.”

But: The 1975’s sterling hooks have sometimes (maybe often) taken a backseat to Healy’s public image. A provocative showman and lyricist who is loose-lipped and outspoken about progressive causes, he’s also engaged in controversial and sometimes offensive behavior, most recently involving racist mockery of Ice Spice on a podcast. (Healy reportedly apologized both in public and to the rapper, and then he kind of deflated the idea of apologizing in a subsequent interview.)

Also: He might have dated Taylor Swift recently?

As a legion of fest-goers gathered Saturday night for the band’s set, the possibility of an outrageous Healy moment loomed. But he and the band kept things all killer, no filler: limited banter, a lot of fan-favorite songs, copious sax and some genuine-seeming gratitude.

Here are three things to know about the show.

The 1975’s packed setlist was full of fan faves.

“We’ve been around for a minute and keep getting better,” Healy said, nodding at the title of their tour, Still … At Their Very Best. “What do you think about that?”

Over the course of 16 songs, the band scoured their discography for some of the catchiest, hope-I-hear-that-live cuts. The crowd screamed in delight for tracks like “Robbers,” with its distinctive opening guitar squeal, and “I’m In Love With You,” a fizzy slice of infatuation that should be the theme song for a Molly Ringwald movie. During “Oh Caroline,” from last year’s album “Being Funny in a Foreign Language,” a fan in the crowd held up a lit cigarette like a lighter (cut out the middleman, sure).

“It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You),” a certified earworm from 2018’s “A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships,” caused mass euphoria. The audience gleefully shouted the words: “Collapse my veins, wearing beautiful shoes/ It's not living if it's not with you.” The song is actually about Healy’s struggles with heroin addiction — writing a happy song about something sad is Pop Star 101. A fan near me said that it sounded so good live; they were right.

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The set’s happiest moment came during “The Sound,” one of The 1975’s best and most danceable songs, from 2016’s “I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It.” A thumping beat matched lyrics about a lover’s heartbeat — an obvious thing to do, but it hit so hard.

“Let’s deal with this crisis of individualism by doing something corny,” Healy said from the stage, before starting a mass crowd jump. “We love you guys,” he said at the end.

The band has a history with Austin.

More affection: “We love Austin,” Healy told the crowd toward the end of the set. The city was the first place The 1975 ever came as a band together. In Healy’s telling, the band was chased out of the house they were staying in by a man who thought they were gay; the young men were sharing a bed because they had no money, Healy said. “True story,” he added. (The band also told the anecdote during a 2014 South by Southwest appearance.)

Matty Healy knows how to be a frontman.

From watching Healy perform the opening number “Looking for Somebody (To Love),” the uninitiated surely just got it — the slippery, sometimes caustic charisma of The 1975’s singer. His knock-kneed dancing and permanently forward neck, his rolling eyes, his hip wiggles and his lit cigarette all signaled a careful student of rock & roll characters.

Not since Lady Gaga has an artist so popularly used the trappings of fame and performance to comment on themselves and their profession. Everything Healy did on stage came with something between a wink and scoff. On “I’m In Love With You,” he smiled ear to ear with bubblegum cheer until it started to feel a little unnatural. After the moody, textured “About You,” he blew kisses, he bowed with a flourish, and then he took a swig from a flask that he held almost as much as the mic.

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The confluence of self-awareness and self-destruction is all there in the songs: “It's not about reciprocation it's just all about me/ A sycophantic, prophetic, Socratic junkie wannabe,” Healy sang with a shimmer on “The Sound.”

“He’s so charming,” a viewer near me said after Healy slurred his way through “Chocolate,” a notoriously hard to parse song about weed and being rebellious. “I get it.”

The 1975 ACL Fest Setlist, Oct. 14, 2023

“Looking for Somebody (To Love)”

“Happiness”

“Oh Caroline”

“I’m In Love With You”

“Me & You Together Song”

“If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)”

“About You”

“Robbers”

“The Sound”

“Chocolate”

“It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You)”

“Somebody Else”

“I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)”

“Love It If We Made It”

“Sex”

“Give Yourself a Try”

More: This mesmerizing aerial photo of Zilker Park during ACL Fest 2023 will give you the feels

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: The 1975 at ACL Fest: These rock stars fill set with fan favorites