‘A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships’ opens with relative silence. Lead singer Matty Healy moves around in what sounds like a seat, before fumbling around with a piano and appearing to experiment with how to deliver his vocal notes. It then explodes into a deep and booming, heavily vocoded voice, delivering the opening track’s “Go down / soft sound” lyric. It’s the weirdest rendition yet, littered throughout with strange computerised noises. I far prefer the previous two LP’s more orchestral-sounding versions of the song, but for an effort that was born just four days before the album was due for mastering, it greatly achieves its goal of setting the scene for the rest of the record.

‘Give Yourself A Try’, a song with autotuned vocals reciting lyrics on Matty’s life up until now (written in a way that allow the listener to delve into some self-reflection, too), set over a backing track with a heavily distorted version of Joy Division’s ‘Disorder’ guitar riff, explodes into life. When the song was released as a single all the way back in May, it took me a few listens to fully understand how I felt about it. It wasn’t something I’d expect The 1975 to put out at all, and I didn’t know if I liked the direction they’d taken, but I knew the song wasn’t total shit. After a few listens, it’s impossible to get the grating guitar out of your head, and the journey through a fan’s suicide, drug addiction, ‘buying fucking seeds and beans online’, and the assurance that it will all be okay is well worth it. Almost six months later, the song is placed into its intended environment – it works extremely well as the first proper song to the album its a part of.

‘TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME’ follows next, with a dancehall-like beat more annoying and repetitive than its name. Healy’s autotune-glistening vocals chant lyrics about infidelity in the digital age. Put quite frankly, the song isn’t for me, and I think it’s the band’s lowest point to date.

How To Draw / Petrichor begins with a gentle lullaby-like tune, building up into a robotic ‘What if you die with all of the cameras?’. The song is a remake of a bonus track off the band’s second album, I Like It When You Sleep For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It, which was more ambient and far more sad. This rendition, however, is more electronic and optimistic, with some of the weird sounds off ‘The 1975’ returning. It then morphs into Petrichor through a breakbeat, a glitch-riddled dance-y electronic track that starts fast, slows down, before speeding back up like a rollercoaster drop into more glitching noises. And, like a rollercoaster, it keeps its listeners on a load of twists and turns over the next minute and a bit – the song hits it final act with the introduction of deep, heavily autotuned vocals that distort the lyrics to the point of being unable to understand them. They speak of Matty’s rehab – ‘write a letter to your future self who won’t change’ being a reference to the two letters he wrote to his future self: one for if he got clean, one for if he didn’t. It also tells him not to lie to his friends and family. The song fucking slaps.

With a much more pessimistic theme than the song preceding it, ‘Love It If We Made It’ begins. It’s the first of the two promotional tracks of the album (not a single), can’t be played on the radio due to its language, yet acts as the de facto lead single anyway. It’s a synth rock song that takes clear inspiration from industrial rock, with its lyrics angrily reciting headlines, quotes, and references from pop culture figures such Milo Yianopolis, Lil Peep, Kanye West, and President Donald Trump. The video references everything from climate change, to Grenfell Tower, the Ku Klux Klan, and Donald Trump. The song is, in my opinion, Matty’s best vocal performance to date, and contains the band’s most meaningful and punchiest lyrics they’ve ever crafted. The angry bassline, drums, synths (an interpolation of The Blue Nile’s ‘Downtown Lights’), and slick production all come together to make the track a solid must listen for me. And if any future historians wish to gauge the mood of society using popular culture in the future, I couldn’t think of a more perfect song for them to flock to.

‘Be My Mistake’ is a soft, 70s soft rock style acoustic song about infidelity, interspersed with soft computerised sounds reminiscent of those that will be heard on ‘The Man Who Married A Robot’ later in the record. It’s one of the few tracks on the album to not feature any effects on the vocals, and it certainly doesn’t suffer for it. Its sad, its heartfelt, and quite beautiful.

‘Sincerity Is Scary’ is another promotional track. Its an RnB song with weird yet extremely snappy production choices, and is perfect to bounce along to. It features the London Community Gospel Choir (featured less prominently on LIIWMI) as the backing vocals and one of jazz musician Roy Hargrove’s (1969 – 2018) final performances, playing the trumpet. Its lyrics criticise postmodernism, callout culture (refusing to educate people who don’t conform to your viewpoint and instead outright expelling them from social circles/popularity), and culture’s obsession with irony, including Matty’s previous use of it (“You lack substance when you say something like ‘what a shame'”). It’s a great, smooth, and fun song – one of the best on the album, despite a group of four Englishmen being the last people you’d expect to make such a song and do it so well.

‘I Like America and America Likes Me’, its title being a reference to Joseph Bueys’ conceptual art piece of the same name, is a Bon Iver-like track, if Bon Iver tried their hand at trap-inspired music. Autotuned vocals scream about kids being scared of dying, even without the threat of a gun killing them, and just ‘wanting Supreme’. They wouldn’t work if you couldn’t tell its singer has already delivered the lines passionately without the effects. The beat is a weird electronica-infused hip hop… thing, with an appearance from the same synths that littered the band’s first album back in 2013. I expected something entirely different from the song, so it came entirely left-field for me and even now, after several listens, is weird, but I really like it.

‘The Man Who Married A Robot / Love Theme’ is a funny yet really dark poem, narrated by Siri, about a man whose life revolves around the internet. He dies a sudden death at the end, but the internet exists after him and in some ways he lives on within it – as his Facebook account. The novelty of having a track narrated by Siri wears off after the first listen, in all honesty. The ‘Love Theme’, which is the backing track, is a bunch of grating chimes that start to get annoying after the poem is over and continue for minutes on end. I’d have preferred if the space this took up was an actual song, or if it wasn’t there in the first place. I can’t see myself not skipping this.

‘Inside Your Mind’, like ‘Give Yourself A Try’, is a Joy Division-inspired cut. This time, rather than directly pay homage with a guitar riff, the band have chosen to wear the influence on their sleeve and make something entirely new. The song begins with piano chords that make it seem like it’s about to explode into a piano anthem, but it slows right down. Creepy lyrics, that somehow get more horrific as the song goes on, narrate a partner’s desire to see inside his partner’s mind. Matty sings it with a low noted hum, a style he hasn’t used since the band’s 2013 debut album on the song ‘Antichrist’. The guitar that kicks in is slow, distorting itself in a similar way to the guitar on ‘Give Yourself A Try’ did, seemingly trying to drown out the piano chords. Somehow, it’s an earworm, and a damn good one.

‘The 1975iest The 1975 song since The 1975’s first album, The 1975,’ is ‘It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You)’. It’s a euphoric, groovy new wave unabashedly poppy song about heroin addiction. It’s one of the best songs on the album – in the top three for sure. This is The 1975 playing to all of their strengths in one song.

‘Surrounded By Heads And Bodies’ is another slow, acoustic song about a woman named Angela, a woman in Matty’s rehab facility who had also been addicted to heroin. He talks about his loneliness in rehab – the song title is taken from the opening lines of ‘Infinite Jest‘ by David Foster Wallace, the joke being that nobody reads past the first page. It wouldn’t sound all that out of place on Coldplay’s now-eighteen-year-old album ‘Parachutes’, if it weren’t for the computerised sound effects making their return. I like it for the same reason I like Be My Mistake.

‘Mine’ fizzes into life soon afterwards, a jazz song that Barry B. Benson would absolutely adore, about believing you can be committed to someone without a marriage certificate. It’s backed with soft lounge-y piano, everything else you’d expect from a jazz standard, and a lovely trumpet solo from Roy Hargrove. It sets the album off on its final run and does one hell of a good job at that. The kind of song you can put on in the background while you do some chores, or kick your feet up with a hot drink and relax before going to sleep.

‘I Couldn’t Be More In Love’ is a sensual 80s-style love ballad about not wanting to be forgotten, with a passionate and raw vocal narration, a choir-backing, sexy synths, sexy piano, sexy cello, sexy violin, and one hell of a sexy guitar solo. It wouldn’t surprise me if a great many couples conceive a child to it at some point – and it’s the perfect song for it. Just saying.

The next song comes from nowhere. It starts off slow, singing lyrics about mundane tasks in life, regrets, and having everything build up to you wanting to ‘say goodbye’. The song then sucker punches you with an electric guitar kicking in as Matty Healy says that your death doesn’t happen to you, but your family and friends, reciting the chorus ‘I always wanna die, sometimes’. Life-affirming lyrics tell the listener to try and keep battling on through life, and that ‘there’s no point in buying concrete shoes’. The lyrics are simple, and there aren’t many, but the message is clear and hits you hard. It sounds similar to something Oasis and Radiohead would have put out in the 90s. It’s an anthem to life, and it’s the absolute highlight of the entire record.

The Verdict

‘A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships’ is a massive step in the right direction for the band – an experimentation in a giant plethora of genres, from RnB to jazz, to industrial rock and anthemic Britpop, while never forgetting its roots. The album’s genre-shifting is perhaps suited to the modern age’s need for something new at every corner, but some songs ruin the pacing of an otherwise tight and near-perfect album. Saying that, it is one of my favourites of the decade, rarely having a low and hitting you with new highs at every turn – here’s to the band’s next endeavour, 2019’s Notes On A Conditional Form, one-upping the living shit out this one.

8/10