Last month, the Manchester group The 1975 put out their third album—A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships, one of GQ's favorite records of the year—and it was a global event that no other band consisting of four white dudes with guitars (frontman Matt Healy's words, not mine) could dare to dream of right now. Listening parties were held in cities on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. The band's entire label team at Dirty Hit, a record company run jointly with Healy, was working around the clock without sleep. Whether it was BBC radio takeovers or in-store signings at record stores in their hometown of Manchester, the group's four members (Healy, Adam Hann, George Daniel, and Ross MacDonald) were on a campaign war trail. And it worked.
They scored Best New Music on Pitchfork (gaining a whole two points since their 6.5-rated sophomore album, I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it). NME—a magazine that called The 1975 “worst band in the world” four years ago—practically turned itself into a 1975 fan account in the build-up and aftermath. The author Caitlin Moran invited Healy to her home in North London to be interviewed by her daughters as part of a cover story for the Times of London. The album topped the U.K. charts and hit No. 4 in the U.S. Cultural gatekeepers who once relished berating the band for the past however many years found themselves in agreement (some begrudgingly so): The 1975 are the best band on earth.
Of course, The 1975 saw it coming. Their fans saw it coming. Before any of that echo-chamber applause, The 1975 had already made the album of the year by doing exactly what they wanted to do for 15 years predating all this.
I first listened to A Brief Inquiry on my own, weeks before its release, at night, with some candles, looking out at the Los Angeles skyline, thinking about the mess of it all. It began to affect me because I felt like it was about me, even though it isn't about me at all. There was also a great sense of relief. Healy builds such a deeply personal bridge between himself and his audience. The first time I ever interviewed him, I wrote about his wanton charisma, commenting that if Healy could pull his heart out of his chest and put it in my hands for safekeeping, he would do it. I can't think of another modern idolized totem quite like him.
I had to stop listening to the album alone. I invited friends over under a veil of secrecy and played it to them so I could watch their reactions. All of them agreed: The record was tremendously special. One Sunday afternoon, I put it on repeat for four hours, and the ball dropped. I thought: “Healy's plea for genuine community in an online society in which our physical proximity is threatened is going to be delivered at just the right moment in the universe! THIS IS HISTORIC!” He wasn't a songwriter to me anymore. He was an architect! A philosopher! Rodin's Thinker in designer suits! I listened to "Love It If We Made It" and thought about the interview I'd conducted with Healy only weeks earlier. He revealed that he'd initiated the song with the idea of making a collage of facetious, triggering tabloid headlines.
In the song's lyrics, I hear the feelings we process from the onslaught of our 24/7 news cycle. Healy relates one disaster after another, his thoughts pivoting from cause to cause with no regard for controlling his own experience with them. Artists spend decades trying to come up with a simple way of capturing human emotion at a given time. Healy achieves that here. I think about the street campaign for the single, the black-and-white billboards of lyrical phrases, such as Trump's tweet: "Thank you Kanye, very cool." He's recycling headlines and reprinting them over highways and intersections. There's no judgment upon society, no mirror held up. It's a presentation of facts about our lives repurposed for a different kind of audience; a more open, more hopeful, more determined audience. Full disclosure: I had eaten mushrooms during this particular listening session. Such is life.
Heralded as “OK Computer for the millennial generation,” A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships has been critiqued with a careful air of defensiveness. There's no need for that. There are comparable points, yes. "Fitter Happier" is reflected in the Siri-voiced "The Man Who Married a Robot / Love Theme"; the assertion in "Airbag" that Thom Yorke is “back to save the universe” has the same superhero complex Healy's consumed with. Tonally, though, it's different. On "Subterranean Homesick Alien," Yorke wants to be abducted by aliens. Healy wants to look reality in the face. He wants to take the president's words (“I moved on her like a bitch”) and deliver them back with the disdain he feels for them. For Yorke, it's far more abstract. The enemy is our race. It's a scorn The 1975 don't possess. Yes, Healy is a nihilist, but a nihilist who likes chart success and kids at his shows. Healy likes people.
Let me tell you something about Radiohead: Thom Yorke has done everything in his power to evade the term “pop” over the course of three decades. Thom Yorke is probably sitting on a mountain of "It's Not Living (If It's Not with You)"'s, but he doesn't want to be The 1975. (Maybe he does deep down and this is why Thom Yorke cannot be trusted.) Radiohead hates The Man. Radiohead bucks trends. Radiohead is anti–the-thing-you-are-doing. Healy is the opposite. Healy wants to embrace your methods of consumption. Healy wants to give the people what they want because it's also what he wants, and it's what his bandmates want. They want all the genres they grew up on. To that point, I've compiled a list of everything A Brief Inquiry reminds me of. It's a fun exercise. You should do it!
- Drake
- D'Angelo
- Bon Iver
- Peter Gabriel
- Joy Division
- Kanye
- Boards of Canada
- Boyz II Men (there has to be a choreographed stool moment for that key change on "I Couldn't Be More in Love")
- Shostakovich
- Blue Nile
- General Public
- Simon & Garfunkel
- Radiohead (mainly The Bends, though!)
- Sade
- Cole Porter
- Joan Baez
- George Michael
- Crowded House
- Mike & The Mechanics
- R.E.M.
- The 1975 (lol)
As for the Beatles comparisons (apparently the band is this generation's Lennon and McCartney), well, the Beatles never had to manipulate the form and hit refresh because they invented the form. They made the rules. They determined what a pop band should look, sound, and perform like. The Beatles don't have to contend with their own legacy in 2018, 55 years after they recorded Meet the Beatles! (though McCartney will happily talk about it all if you ask him). But anyone else who's ever picked up a guitar or sat at a piano does.
We don't need to be retromaniacs in order to laud this album. The best songs are the ones that tell the future, not the past. A Brief Inquiry is about what's around the corner, and what's outside right now. Besides, fuck nostalgia. Aren't you tired of being part of a society that always has to apologize for itself? That always has to humbly lower its head in appeasement of its elders in order to offend the minimum number of people?
The key to A Brief Inquiry is that it couldn't be more reactive to 2018 unless Healy had finished it at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve (which is probably why he's already working on the follow-up, Notes on a Conditional Form). “I'm scared of dying!” he cries at the beginning of "I Like America & America Likes Me," a rebellion against his own mortality. The song is a shocking reflection of how America's youth feel going to school every day in the year of the Parkland shooting. “What's a fiver? Being young in the city / Believe and say something,” he pleads. When you're young and making it in the world, a fiver might not get you much, but the short change will light a fire under your ass. The chorus reminds me of my twenties in London, riding the bus back to suburbia at 1 a.m. with nothing but a dirty kebab and Burial's Untrue for company. “Believe and say something” is the momentum that keeps you going through those nights.
The album is unrelenting with moments like this. Healy's voice has never sounded more masculine or daunted than on the piano ballad "Inside Your Mind." A jagged guitar line evokes a slow death while Healy sorrowfully lays his love on the table for someone who can't provide the answers he sorely needs. He wants to know what she dreams, what she thinks, threatening to “crack” her head open “just to see what's inside your mind.” It's obsessionally romantic, enough so to induce a week-long migraine. It's desperately human. Then there's "Surrounded by Heads and Bodies," which documents Healy's Barbados retreat for drug-addiction rehabilitation. The character “Angela” was the other patient, but they never crossed paths. On the track list, it follows the over-the-top pop spectacular of "It's Not Living (If It's Not with You)" (the cheeriest ode to heroin addiction you've ever heard, inspired by Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven Is a Place on Earth"). Its instrumentation provides serenity in its pitter-pattering drum beats and plucked guitar strings. It sounds like how you feel when you open your eyes the morning after the worst night you can't remember.
We're at the end: "I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)." The tear-jerker. “I bet you thought your life would change / But you're sat on a train again,” Healy begins. You can't listen to it without envisioning him doing it during headline festival slots. This is the encore. Something like (but not in thrall to) "Champagne Supernova" by Oasis. The tragedy of "Champagne Supernova" is Noel Gallagher's lyricism (he admits he wrote it while “out of it”). The words cannot match the landscape. You know how to feel when that song comes on: alive. But: “Slowly walking down the hall / Faster than a cannonball / Where were you while we were getting high?”
Healy put the puzzle together for me. The "champagne supernova" is the moment we combust from indulgence, excessive stimuli, even anxiety. When Healy sings, “But your death it won't happen to you / It happens to your family and your friends,” he's asking you to attempt to live by your own rules. He's reminding you not to be absent in your own joy. Because soon you'll be stuck in traffic on a Monday morning again, reading the fucking Internet.
Every album by The 1975 has opened with an intro song that's always titled "The 1975," and the words “Taking up your mouth, so you breathe through your nose.” Every time The 1975 return, they want to take your breath away. Instead, on their third LP, they've resuscitated the hopeless the best way they know how: with the year's best pop songs.