Manchester pop outfit the 1975’s third album, A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships, tackles anxiety, addiction, trauma, self-loathing, disillusionment, cynicism, and death. Dark subject matter, to be sure, but the music around it—a thrilling combination of sophisti-pop polish, post-punk attitude, and art-student swagger—is incandescent.
The guitar figure that begins “It’s Not Living (If It’s Not with You)” conjures the image of a fist thrust into a neon sky, while “Mine” and “Inside Your Mind,” two ballads that wring every ounce of emotion from frontman Matty Healy’s voice, evoke the unmistakable feeling of a new day breaking. Everything is so bright that, sometimes, it’s easy to miss the gravity of the lyrics. But that seems intentional: this is an album for the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it social media era, when real, meaningful ideas about life, loss, and everything in between require more effort to grasp than most are willing to make.
Pop has seen this sleight of hand before. Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A” was so exuberant that many missed its scathing rebuke of the Vietnam War. Post-grunge stalwarts Third Eye Blind’s hit “Semi-Charmed Life” disguised a cautionary tale about crystal meth with power chords and an irrepressible, bubblegum-pop refrain. It’s no mystery why this trick has been deployed so often: Everyone wins. The average listener gets the thrill of an earworm, serious fans get a deeper story, and the artists get to keep their artistic credibility while reaching a wider audience.
The 1975’s entire aesthetic—and the increasingly profitable career they’ve forged from it—hinges on this tension between form and content. They love effervescent, walking-on-cloud-nine melodies, but not as much as they love black humor and sordid stories about millennial self-destruction. On A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships, Healy seems especially preoccupied with drug addiction and the desolation that it can cause. “Love If It We Made It,” the album’s first single, begins with what is arguably the year’s most of-the-moment couplet, a sequence of 16 words that capture, with extreme concision, what it’s like to be young, disaffected, and desperate in 2018: “We’re fucking in a car, shooting heroin/Saying controversial things just for the hell of it.” It’s a song high on its own timeliness—one with a biting intellect but a short attention span. In the span of four minutes, it references Trump, Jesus, Kanye West, Lil Peep, environmentalism, liberalism, hedonism, greed, war, and love. One can imagine it as a rewrite of “Born in the U.S.A.,” but scrawled onto the back of a napkin, torched, and tossed into an alleyway.
Healy has long been vocal about his own struggle with addiction. On “Medicine,” the band’s contribution to 2014’s ambitious re-scoring of Nicholas Wending Refn’s Drive, he admits he’s no match for temptation. “How could I refuse?/Yeah, you rid me of the blues,” he sings, his voice falling somewhere between a cry for help and a sigh of pleasure. A few years later, on the anthemic ’80s pastiche “The Sound,” he would call himself “a sycophantic, prophetic, Socratic junkie wannabe,” offering his best self-portrait to date.
However, even with its frequent invocations of heroin, A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships isn’t just about drugs; it’s also about how we self-medicate in a world of such stark superficiality that nothing seems to matter. On “TooTimeTooTimeTooTime,” Healy turns to sex as a salve. “I swear that I/Only called her one time,” he sings, before quickly correcting himself: “Maybe it was two times.” Lyrically, the song is a meditation on modern infidelity. Sonically, it’s pure momentum, a mile-a-minute rush of serotonin and sweat and crackling synth-pop energy. “Give Yourself a Try,” meanwhile, lifts the central riff from Joy Division’s “Disorder” to scold some Instagram addict who spends “obscene amounts on seeds and beans online.”
There’s much to admire about A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships. It could even mark the beginning of the 1975’s “imperial phase”—what Pet Shop Boys’s Neil Tenant describes as the period when a group or artist can do no wrong, critically, creatively, or commercially. Praise has already been heaped upon the album, but it’s not without its flaws. Some of the more experimental compositions—the Auto-Tune-driven fantasia “How to Draw/Petrichor,” the Britpop wannabe “I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes),” the eponymous opening track—feel like half-finished sketches without a memorable melody in sight. But maybe that’s the point. This is a content-saturated album for a content-saturated world. Here, there’s real substance and there’s total fluff, and it’s up to us to find out what’s worth listening to.
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