It’s so goddamn fun to hate The 1975. They are the ultimate trigger for all the self-professed “hipster music” aficionados. Long and ridiculous album titles, an eccentric frontman in Matty Healy, and an air of “trying too hard while also not trying at all” makes The 1975 a source of contempt for all of the pop music skeptics.
For a time, it was also extremely easy to hate them. 2016’s I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it mixed incredibly bland indie-pop ballads with a creepy-as-fuck album title. Aside from the ever-infectious “Love Me,” The 1975 had little to offer, save for moodiness.
Their latest, A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, is thankfully a breath of fresh air. Setting a side the title that sounds like it came from the annoying kid in your philosophy class, The 1975 show incredible skill at stealing ideas from other bands and using them to their advantage. I may sound like I’m being facetious, but I really don’t have a problem with wearing your influences on your sleeve. Unless, of course, you’re Greta Van Fleet and you copy a band’s sound while making it sound way shittier. But I digress.
The opening track (not counting the prelude) is “Give Yourself A Try,” a delightful, bubblegum-flavored, Joy Division-style jam. It’s an amusingly tongue-in-cheek song about conformity, and like much of the rest of the album, is riddled with current-year references guaranteed to be outdated within the next decade.
The following track, “TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME,” echoes the modern-day dance house that currently dominates the airwaves. It also exists as veiled commentary of the modern digital age. “Love It If We Made” is the least subtle example of this theme, explicitly mentioning several of the political and social issues that people constantly argue about on Twitter (and of course, includes the lyric “Thank you Kanye, very cool!”).
The band doesn’t really have much to say about these issues, but perhaps that’s the way it’s meant to be. The 1975 don’t really strike as the most political people, but rather as people who are a bit more like me; I just watch the chaos unfold and scoff at the absurdity of it all.
Other highlights on the album include a new version of “How To Draw,” complete with a glitchy outro taken straight from the 1990’s Richard D. James playbook. Also memorable is “The Man Who Married A Robot,” which is essentially Radiohead’s “Fitter Happier” adjusted for inflation.
The second half of the nearly hour-long record lacks the variety of the first, defaulting to mostly 80’s-style ballads with sappier lyrics. It reminded me a bit of what I hated about I like it when you sleep, but is made much more tolerable simply by the fact that it is paired with some much stronger performances.
As an admitted “poptimist,” I can’t help but enjoy The 1975’s combination of cynicism, experimentation, and mass appeal. While the constant Instagram stories of the album’s cover posted by my female university colleagues get slightly tedious, I can’t really blame them. This is an album for the social media-lovers (or haters, depending on how much social media sucks the life out of you).
I would have preferred A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships to be more consistent, and maybe a little bit shorter, but the improvement upon their previous work is commendable and much more friendly to repeated listens. If nothing else, the album provides a dose of positivity to the entry-level indie kids searching for their next musical vice, while simultaneously angering the more pretentious hipsters who grow enraged when their favorite bands’ ideas are used for more mainstream purposes.
Ryan’s Score: 7.1
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