Albums Of The Year: The 1975 Made Their Most Online And Most Lovable Project Yet

Imagine, for a moment, the electric guitar. Imagine a tone so processed and mechanized you'd mistake it for a power tool. Think about what you can convey with that sort of timbre — anger, probably, or youthful aggravation, or perhaps even wild love — and right now think about how The 1975 weaponize it.


Imagine how that fuzzy onslaught propels "Give Yourself a Try," the euphoric first song we heard from the band's A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, into a caffeine rush of positivity. As musical group leader Matty Healy calmly intones about addiction, sex, and being "a Millennial that Baby Boomers like," that guitar noise isn't hawking punkish anger, nevertheless self-love. He's not angry. He's just seen some shit.


Consider one more thing: what occurs eight tracks down the line, as soon as that same sound slows to a humid crawl on the Britpop weeper indoors Your Mind." Here, Healy and his musical group create a carousel of lovelorn melodrama around that buzzing fulcrum — the same one that they, years before, used to usher in an emo barrage on a song called "Sex." Endless moods. One squalling guitar tone.


This effervescent guitar clamor is only one of the devices The 1975 make use of on the hopscotching Brief Inquiry, their third venture into Millennials’ collective heart of darkness. Except this time, Healy isn't so young anymore. He'll be 30 soon, so he's taken to "getting spiritually enlightened at 29" and dropping way also much money on coffee and records — however hey, it beats the harder stuff. He is aware that side of it, too.


Healy offers up "It's Not Living (If It's Not With You)" as a musing on his own opiate addiction, for which he sought treatment last year. As there's no shortage of rock and roll songs about heroin, "It's Not Living" alternatively glows like a liquid pop Lite-Brite, glittering with keyboards alternatively opposed to stadium guitars. Healy treats his own experience cautiously, including in interviews, unequivocally calling drug abuse "bullshit" and lowering his sunglasses for emphasis any time talking to MTV News last month.


While much of the album's lead-up focused on his struggle with substances, any time it arrived, Brief Inquiry revealed itself to be even weirder. There's a song called "The Man Who Wedded a Robot / Love Theme" along with a funk-saturated examination of irony. Key moments while in "Surrounded By Heads and Bodies" and "I Routinely Wanna Perish some days scream by-the-books British rock (namely Radiohead). And then Healy will hop on a vocoder-drenched mic or rhyme over the late Roy Hargrove's horns and you'll remember you’re dealing with a polyglot.


Brief Inquiry, while not being especially brief (at 58 minutes), is definitely very online. An actual computer speaks the robot love song's lyrics. Endlessly debated single "Love It If We Made It" flicks through world-burning headlines like a thumb on a phone screen. Healy's earnestness makes a line like "you text that boy some days impossibly endearing. However even because the album maintains its ambitions, quieter acoustic moments punctuate its tech-addled brain. It’s a real document of being alive in 2018. We're scared of breaking our phones. We'd also love to be so unburdened.