Review: The 1975 - A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships

The 1975 - A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships

This is one of those albums that makes no sense and perfect sense at the same time. Coming off of an impressive build-up of their self-titled debut and sophomore I Like It When You Sleep…, their trajectory seemed both somewhat easy to read but also incredibly impressive. But their next stage of evolution expanded so dramatically on two particular aspects of their identity that they’ve nearly reinvented themselves while still bafflingly making total sense. While previous staples of smart social commentary in their lyrics and juggling a multitude of genres on a micro-scale took place as smaller pieces within a fairly solid and more dominant signature framework of R&B/pop/rock, that mold has entirely broken under the weight of those elements and the balance has skewed, likely beyond recover. Social commentary and every genre in popular music within reach are the new shape of the band with their old sonic identity being wrapped around it to fit, and it’s likely they’re not turning back for next year’s Notes On A Conditional Form. 

The opening track alone says it all before you even realize what you’re getting into for the next hour. Like their two previous albums, we are greeted with the band’s eponymous theme song, and just like those two releases, it is a re-interpretation within the style and theme of the album it is introducing. Their debut’s version took the form of a dreamy shoegaze mood stretching into infinity with guitar gently plinking in the back before giving way to “The City”’s rock beat. ILIWYS took that same tune and injected it full of soul and atmosphere with a choir and thick synth bed to rest upon before building into the twisted 80’s riff of “Love Me”. This new interpretation starts with gentle lo-fi jazz piano trying to find the song, along with Matt Healy trying to sing a melody, as if a musician were sitting at the piano trying to write things as they come to mind, playing with the notes and seeing what takes shape. This lasts for a few seconds before the piano is joined by a thunderous auto-tuned Matt, delivering with no discernible sense of time signature or tempo, bringing strongly to mind Kanye West’s vocoder solo during “Runaway”. This then disappears and the fizzing guitar and post-punk beat of “Give Yourself A Try” kicks things off. There are 15 songs on this album, and that doesn’t even begin to describe what you’re in for.

There’s dance pop (“TooTimeTooTimeTooTime”), ambient music straight out of the early múm playbook accompanied by a robotic vocoder speaking about learning how to draw that curves into an upbeat glitch/ EDM track with a down-pitched warped voice (“How To Draw/ Petrichor”), dramatic rock/ pop/ R&B with a blast of soul (“Love It If We Made It”), acoustic ballads (“Be My Mistake” and “Surrounded by Heads and Bodies”), neo-jazz/ soul (“Sincerity Is Scary”), desperate and pleading trap-infused electronica (“I Like America & America Likes Me”), humorous yet hauntingly beautiful spoken word/ ambient/ orchestral (“The Man Who Married A Robot/ Love Theme”), 80’s John Hughes-drenched power ballad (“Inside Your Mind”), bubblegum pop (“It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You)”), smoky down-tempo jazz balladry (“Mine”), an 80’s love ballad straight out of Michael Bolton and Lionel Ritchie town (“I Couldn’t Be More In Love”), and finally a shocking and stunning 90’s alt-rock ballad burning the album to the ground in its final moments atop the shoulders of Oasis and Blur (“I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)”).

Lyrically, this is the story of 2018. This is a snapshot of the time we live in right now, viewed honestly and unapologetically, not truly condemning or praising anything, but describing it so straight-forwardly that to read it is to already know how you should feel about it. It is the story of people living on the internet, their entire lives, social interactions, news absorption, romances, entertainment, all playing out on electronic devices, connecting us to an infinite supply of stimuli and replacing meaningful action and life in the real world. We read and react to headlines about shocking and terrible things happening in our news feed while ignoring the actual real world event itself. Our eyes are simultaneously drawn to both advertisements for products we desire as well as news of us hating each other and killing the environment, both displayed on our screens at the same time with the same prominence and given the same amount of attention, though out of the two, the first is much more likely to get an investment from us. This is the world where a man can fall in love with the internet and believe it to be his best and only friend who will always protect him and agree with him and show him only the things he wants to see, a world where we no longer need other people to think we have a happy life, where we don’t need to talk to someone who doesn’t believe what we do, where we an construct our own electronic bubble. And within this bubble we lose all sense of what it means to composedly confront that which we don’t agree with, the things that scare or worry us, and thus what may have once been something to build strength, character, and learn more about the world is now transformed into a tidal wave of anxiety and perceived existential threat. This is the life of millennials and beyond.

There are four core tracks that tell this story on a readily identifiable level while the rest of the album is a more indirect and personal take for Matt Healy. “TooTime” tells of a world where all of our relationships happen through social media, and the lines between friendship and romance are more blurred than ever before, resulting in a couple fighting over how they comment on other people’s posts, who and how often they’re calling and texting, and whether or not they should have liked each other’s posts. “Love It If We Made It” is comprised almost entirely of headlines ripped from social media over the past few years, with line after line of absolutely shocking material that just flashes past us as we numbly scroll down our screens, yet shows a genuine optimistic hope that in spite of how awful we can be, it would be really great if we as a species survive a worsening global situation. “I Like America” is a frantic and confused take of someone surrounded by gun violence, destruction, and hatred who is scared of dying and wanting to find a place to lay down (this last bit could ambiguously be either a safe place to rest, or asking a police officer where it is they want them to be on the ground to avoid further escalation). Finally, there is “The Man Who Married A Robot”, which tells the story of an internet troll who finds comfort in the internet, the two fall in love and get married, and spend the rest of his days with the internet maintaining his electronic bubble of only seeing the things he likes, having food delivered to him, and not having to be a part of the real world.

Personally, I think that ILIWYS is the stronger album between the two, and the one I much more prefer. Musically, ABIIOR isn’t up to the same high calibre, and I think that the band’s less direct lyrics showed a more skillful delivery than the attention-grabbing present social commentary here. That being said, it does manage to do what ILIWYS did in terms of forming what I like to think of is a proper album, where all of the tracks contribute to and support the central theme or story. ABIIOR, however, does it in a completely opposite manner. Whereas the previous album had a natural flow and consistency of timbre, mood, and lyrical tone, while still allowing every single track to stand entirely on its own as a quality work, this new release has a vast array of contrasting and varied styles and tones, a collection of songs which really don’t flow or work together, with some tracks being markedly stronger than others, and yet together they form a central motif so strong that it transcends any weaknesses and holds it together as an artistic statement. None of these songs belong together like ILIWYS’s did, they are all very much stand alone and individual thoughts plucked out of a restless mind turning its attention to a myriad of all the things assaulting the senses of any young person who lives on the internet of today. And yet the overall tapestry painted by these individual stories woven from the fabric of now, despite the incongruous nature of all of these isolated tales, describes the same world from different viewpoints and issues, and it all coalesces into the shape of what it means to live in the world today. And though musically inferior on most accounts, it achieves a higher plateau of artistry than ILIWYS, eschewing an album of enjoyable and well-crafted songs in favour of a grand statement that can live on longer than a single’s lifespan on a music chart.

Time will tell where this album belongs in the overall narrative of music and social history; it’s quite possible, if not likely, that ILIWYS will in the end be the more fondly remembered statement of the band when the sociopolitical climate which birthed this work is gone and forgotten. But it is unquestionably the essential statement and snapshot of this moment in time which no other work of the last few years can claim - 2018, all of its ups, downs, outright insanity, and all the people on this planet trying to live through it and figure it all out, is ABIIOR. The 1975 have created an album for a generation feeling lost and grasping for sense and identity, not unlike American Idiot, OK Computer, Born In the USA, Dark Side of the Moon, or The Beatles.

And now we wait for Mr. West to lay some ridiculous unfounded claim to the mastery on display here.

Thank you, Kanye, very cool!