We could all use a bit of a screen break right about now. After months in quarantine staring at our phones endlessly and bingeing every series ever made, our eyes and brains are turning to mush. Well, The 1975 have an app for that.
A site, actually, so more screens, but the band’s new Mindshower AI portal is intended to as a kind of digital detox for fans to “learn, share and create.”
The virtual space — an offshoot of the trippy, meme-filled video for “The Birthday Party” — is described this way on the landing page. “Welcome to Mindshower — you must really be looking forward to going offline for a while.
Once you enter you’ll be able to learn from the visionary minds behind The 1975, create using tools from the band’s library of resources, and share your creations with your digital detox supervisor.”
The band encourages fans to poke around and look at the literature in the waiting area before moving on to the “wealth of unseen treasures” that await you inside. Once there, you can click around and check out journals about the band’s stage sets from set designer Tobias Rylander, complete with schematics, a ‘zine with dozens of graphical “studies and b-roll” from the Notes on a Conditional Form era from designer Samuel Burgess Johnson, unseen photos from photographer Jordan Curtis Hughes and creative director Patricia Villirillo and backstage production glimpses from Jonathan Gilmore.
The “Birthday Party” video is also secretly embedded in a wall behind the Mindshower front desk.
There’s a fountain that plays songs from the album and if you click around long enough (check out the computer) you can download some extras from Conditional Form, which drops Friday (May 22). Plus, check out the links to make your own merch, and remix songs using the stems from the album’s tracks.
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