The 1975- A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships Review

A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships Review

	Score: 5 stars

The band from Manchester seem to secure their place in the music world while also propelling themselves to new heights in their genre-hopping third album

With their third album, entitled A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, The 1975 continue their trend of creating songs that are completely different from each other while also managing to make it seem new and fresh. They also seem to have pushed themselves even further with songs like I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes) and Love It If We Made It which makes this album one of the most politically sound albums of this generation.

Matty Healy really seems to have an understanding of the power he has in his position as a musician and utilises to the full extent on this record, and that comes out on songs such as Love It If We Made It with lyrics like ‘Selling melanin and then suffocate the black men’ and ‘Rest in peace, Lil Peep’ which shows Healy’s lyrical genius in terms of his social commentary on life and culture in 2018 and beyond. 

The album comes after Matty Healy’s stint in rehab for this heroin addiction, which he mentions in the song Surrounded by Heads and Bodies, where he sings about a woman he met in the rehab facility in Barbados, whom he gives the name of ‘Angela’. He spent seven weeks in the facility before the album came out. This song has an acoustic feel to it which The 1975 seem to master perfectly on the occasion where they create a more stripped-back track. There are a few of those moments in their third album, with songs like Be My Mistake which is about guilt as Matty said in his interview with Pitchfork. A lot of this album’s genius comes down to self-produced aspect of it, as Healy and The 1975’s drummer George Daniel produced the whole album themselves. Daniel has produced many other projects under the label the band is signed to, Dirty Hit, such as for the Birmingham psych pop star, Amber Bain’s, also known as The Japanese House’s first album and he also worked on Pale Waves’ debut album My Mind Makes Noises.

The album opens with the trademark self-titled track that has kicked off every The 1975 album thus far and always has the same lyrics but with a different instrumentation every time in order to fit the style of the album. This album is just an inkling of what is to come from The 1975, as they are releasing a second album next year, entitled Notes on a Conditional Form. These two albums come as part of the Music For Cars era which is a reference to one of their first EPs. This album is something that will be remembered for years to come and it further reinforces that The 1975 are one of the best bands in the world today.