‘You learn a couple of things when you get to my age,” announces Matt Healy, 29, a few minutes into the 1975’s third album. You suspect it is delivered with a wink to the camera. Nevertheless, the two and half years since their previous album, I Like It When You Sleep for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It have been eventful for the band’s frontman, taking in vast commercial success, heroin addiction and a spell in rehab.
Healy and the rest of the 1975 have reappeared with an album that clearly wants to be an epochal statement: the presence of a spoken-word track performed by Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant, and the distinctly Radiohead-like song I Always Wanna Die Sometimes implies it wants to be a millennial OK Computer. But behind the handwringing angst and existential despair, OK Computer was remarkably focused and direct. A Brief Enquiry Into Online Relationships feels more like the musical equivalent of a drunk early hours social media post, as a spew of unedited ideas veers from inspired to faintly regrettable.
There is a hugely impressive musical diversity on display, which seems as much to do with reflecting how music exists online – everything immediately available, stripped of its historical context – as with showing off the contents of the band’s record collection. There’s something breathless about how it leaps from Drake-esque Auto-Tune to the smoky west coast jazz of Mine, to Love It If We Made It, (which sounds like Tears for Fears circa Songs from the Big Chair) to Give Yourself a Try’s knowing homage to Joy Division’s Disorder.
The album has more to offer than a series of clever pastiches. The band’s inventive songwriting never stints on radio friendliness – the melody of TooTimeTooTimeTooTime is effervescent, while I Couldn’t Be More in Love is the kind of epic song that TV talent-show contestants feel impelled to take on. But they also push themselves. The vocal on Petrichor floats over stammering, glitchy techno; a quarter of Sincerity Is Scary is taken up with its intro, a cosseting blend of jazzy horns and piano.
On the downside, Healy has a tendency to occasionally tell you things you wish he’d kept to himself. The acoustic ballad Be My Mistake has a lovely melody, but it is also the sound of a rock star complaining about ladies wanting to have sex with him, as curious a play for the listener’s sympathy today as it was ever was. Then again, operating without filter is the point of Matty Healy. The same strange personality evinced in his interviews – where grandiose rock-star pronouncements vie with painful honesty – weaves through A Brief Inquiry.
Boldly, the album goes big on a deeply unfashionable, Bono-esque belief in the power of rock, as means of communication and as a unifying force in an atomised world. “Instead of calling me out you should be pulling me in,” Healy sings. This is not a belief without pitfalls. There are certainly moments where his self-appointed spokesman-for-a-generation role weighs a little heavily and he ends up dealing in windy melodramatics – “modernity has failed us!” – or singing things such as “rest in peace Lil Peep / the poetry is in the streets”.
That tendency is undercut by Healy’s touching candour. The depiction of his heroin addiction on It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You) is funny and unsparing, devoid of self-pity, at odds with the beautifully turned 80s pop backing. As a lover, he doesn’t emerge terribly well from Inside Your Mind or Sincerity Is Scary, both unvarnished portraits of jealousy and hypocrisy. He has a habit of completely wrong-footing you. The Siri-voiced The Man Who Married a Robot starts out abysmally – like a well-meaning but excruciating youth theatre group performance about the perils of the internet – but it unexpectedly turns witty and sharp. Surrounded By Heads and Bodies is another gorgeous song, delicate and understated, that takes its title from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. This seems pretentious until you realise it is from the book’s opening line – the implication being that Healy, like many people, couldn’t face reading the whole thing.
A Brief Inquiry is not the unqualified triumph the 1975 had in mind. It’s stronger and punchier than its predecessor, but has moments where the group overreach. You could argue it’s rather confused, but, as Healy would doubtless point out, it is meant to reflect the times we live in, and they’re pretty confusing. And it is never boring – it’s too restless and skittish for that, shot through with a very believable personality of its own. For all the reference points and deployment of chart-pop tropes, it couldn’t belong to anyone else.
This week Alexis listened to
Metro – Criminal World
Cherry Red’s forthcoming glam comp All the Young Droogs is packed with eye-popping stuff. Who wouldn’t want to hear I Like It Both Ways by Supernaut? But the musical pick might be this, super-slick post-Roxy sophistication, later covered by David Bowie.
