A Five-Year Inquiry Into Online Relationships

The 1975 released A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships five years ago. One of their best-reviewed albums, does the 2018 LP still hold up today?

WARNING: Late in the review I delve into “I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes) and briefly into the ideas of suicide. Read at your own behest, or skip the 15th paragraph entirely. 

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The 1975 can certainly be an acquired taste for some. I, myself, took a long time to warm up to them,not really liking them until my senior year of high school,  and they only became my favorite band during this most recent tour and album push, but now, and this seems to be the case with the majority of their fans, they are the soundtrack to my life. I have gone even as far as to get their eponymous box tattooed on my leg, because I am a Very Normal Person Who Makes Sound Choices. 

(Trigger warning for hairy legs)

All of this to say that this piece will be more personal for me, as I write about one of my favorite albums ever, that being A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships. While Being Funny in a Foreign Language cemented their status as my favorite band, the 1975’s 2018 album opened my eyes to the band being artistic masterminds and not just the “band that sings Chocolate and the Sound.” I’m only half-joking when I call them masterminds, by the way. Matty Healy can have, let’s say, a contentious personality, and the band can certainly take some swings that don’t work out, but A Brief Inquiry is typically heralded as their best album, and one of the best of the 2010s, for good reason. Brief Inquiry blends the bands penchant for creating earworm anthems that will be stuck in your head long after you’ve listened to them with commentary on the internet, relationships, being human and social interactions in the modern era. 

This album has often been compared to Radiohead’s OK Computer obviously due to the technology-references in the album’s titles. This is a disservice to both bands, not only because they’re both going for different sounds, but different messages. In OK Computer, the dystopia is well on its way; in Brief Inquiry, it’s already here, creating an album that is much more reflective than looking towards. 

The music starts off with what would end up being the last variant of the original “The 1975” opening tracks, this time with a techno twist. Notes on a Conditional Form would bring in Greta Thunberg for a speech about the climate crisis, and Being Funny starts with a completely different song where Matty Healy writes about the current times and his past mistakes, but for A Brief Inquiry, the band keeps the same lyrics as their self-titled debut and I Love It When You Sleep, shifting the music and tone slightly to fit this album’s themes. 

The album really starts off, getting right into it, with “Give Yourself a Try.” The song uses a great electric guitar riff, combined with Healy’s penchant for self-deprecating lyrics, to explode into your ears. Healy writes about something that I think most people born after Gen X really feel- that the previous generations know they’re wrong, they’ve ruined the modern day with their incessant politicking and right wing beliefs, and they like that we haven’t yet called them out or sufficiently fought back. Healy writes in the third verse: “And I was 25 and afraid to go outside, A millennial that baby-boomers like.” The song, despite Healy’s own self-immolation, does offer an important solution: giving yourself a try. This might sound obvious, based off the title of the song, but it’s something Healy stresses throughout most of his work, including the band’s most recent tour. He doesn’t want you to give up, to be broken down by those in power who are keen on stopping any sort of change; he wants you to be you. “Give Yourself a Try” is an anthem, one with a great guitar backing it, but it’s far better at being a self-affirmation song than something like Katy Perry’s “Roar.” Healy is completely earnest here, which creates a great single to start off the tracklist.

“TooTimeTooTimeTooTime” is probably one of the more polarizing 1975 hits, but over the years, I’ve come to appreciate it. The song’s lyrics and instrumentation lend itself to the flirty, lack-of-serious-relationship vibes the song is going for, and it helps create the idea that dating in the modern age is a situation where it's all too easy to cheat, another key theme of the album. It’s easier to be joking, to not take things seriously, than it is to be sincere, which gets touched on multiple times throughout the album.

How to Draw/Petrichor is a piece of ambient music that’s become something of a running joke amongst fans. There’s no lyrics, and it largely acts as a bridge to the later songs. It’s interesting, for sure, but its not one of the more memorable pieces of ambient music, like “An Encounter” from their eponymous 2013 album.

“Love It If We Made It” simply put might be one of the most important songs of the 2010s and the years to come. Healy and crew go all out on this one, creating a song that largely acts as an anthem against everything wrong with society around 2018 and the years to come. The song wastes no time, and the amount of anger Healy has towards the powers that be is immediately felt. In 2023, the song has also been a bit prophetic, as lines like “Thank you Kanye, very cool” have taken on a new meaning since the song was released. 

“Be My Mistake” and “Sincerity is Scary” continue the ideas from “TooTimeTooTimeTooTime”, but in a much more outwardly eloquent manner. “Be My Mistake” is an acoustic ballad about Healy cheating on his partner/not quite being over his last partner, while “Sincerity is Scary” delves into the idea of how letting people know how you really feel, telling people what you really think, and not hiding behind the internet and screens, is increasingly harder and harder. Being real to yourself and how you feel, letting yourself enjoy something that other people might not or see as cheesy, is almost impossible; the internet has created the need for everyone and their personas to always be draped in a layer of irony. Healy writes “You try and mask your pain in the most postmodern way, You lack substance when you say, Something like, "Oh, what a shame", It's just a self-referential way, That stops you having to be human,” yearning for a time where people were sincere and not trying to garner clicks. A simpler, better time. 

“I Like America and America Likes Me” is one of the more difficult songs to decipher. The title would suggest an outwardly introspection on American and Healy’s relationship with it, being from Manchester and all, but the lyrics actually seem to point at Healy’s relationship with himself. There’s lines that definitely act as or can be twisted into working as a commentary on America, such as the lines “Kids don't want rifles, They want Supreme, No gun required, Oh, will this help me lay down?” Throughout most of the song, however, the questions are pointed squarely at Healy, such as “Is that designer? Is that on fire?Am I a liar? Oh, will this help me lay down?” The song uses autotune to robotize Healy’s voice, and it works with the technological motifs the band is using across the album. 

“The Man Who Married a Robot” is essentially the song version of the film Her, with the song being a bit of stretch here. There’s instrumentation, but the lyrics are spoken by a robot voice and tell the story of a man who indeed married a robot. It’s a little funny to listen to, but also largely chilling and dystopian to listen to, while feeling not too far off from what we have and deal with now. 

“Inside Your Mind” is one of the most underrated songs in the entire 1975 discography. The song sounds exactly like it’s title would suggest, sonically creating a piece that feels like you’re listening to it in the utter recesses of your mind. It’s about being in love with someone and wanting to know what makes them tick, why they are the way they are. It’s almost the opposite feeling of “Sincerity is Scary”; you love this person for who they are, and want to know everything you can about them.

“It’s Not Living (If It’s Not with You)” might be one of the greatest songs ever written. No joke. It’s an earworm that you are pleased to never leave your mind. Healy combines the tenets of pop with gospel to create a song that tells the story of a toxic relationship that both parties need to keep going in order to survive. Of course, this is the most apparent song on the album that delves into Healy’s substance abuse issues, but it’s done in such a suave, poppy, catchy way that you would be forgiven for not realizing that right away. The chorus is one of the best choruses the band has ever written, and the verses have their own merits, especially in a live setting when the crowd gets to shout “selling petrol” back to Healy and the crew. This is a very hard song for me to be unbiased about, as this has been my favorite 1975 song since it came out, and I love it so much that I got the title tattooed on me. However, I do think it is easily one of their best songs, no matter the context, and I don’t know anyone I’ve shown this song to who didn’t immediately love it. 

“Surrounded by Heads and Bodies” sounds almost like the come down of a relationship/drug, and the longing that comes with it. “Mine” is a jazz piano ballad about being content with the situation/relationship you're in, which is a rare theme for a song, especially in the 1975’s library. “I Couldn’t Be More In Love” is the exclamation of that feeling, mixed with the uncertainty of what to do with that when you’re so used to being let down. These three songs work together in delivering a great expose of how love can feel, especially in Healy’s mind and in his experience. 

The album rounds out and finishes it’s run with the incredible, reflective, depressing but also hopeful “I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes).” The song deals with Healy’s own existentialism, his fear of death but also the depression and anxiety that can come along whenever you feel like you aren’t living up to your own abilities, or you’re living in a spot that isn’t good for you, or you’re wondering who you really are, along with a host of other ideas posed by the song. While the song’s lyrics are certainly dark, and any song dealing with even the base ideas of something like suicide is going to be rough and depressing, Healys’ vocals are actually uplifting and hopeful, as he crescendoes into a belting of the song’s final chorus that feels like someone letting out all their demons. Despite the dark themes, this song is largely therapeutic, and a rock star like Healy sharing his own fears and anxieties like this is rare and encouraging to hear. This song sends the album out in a memorable way, and Healy’s last utterance of “sometimes” provides an unexpected but hopeful ending. 

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A Brief Inquiry was heralded when it came out as The 1975’s best, and it still largely is seen as that five years later. The impact of the album is still felt, even within the band’s recent work, as the themes this album tries to offer- the importance of actually interacting with people, being sincere, getting off your phone and living your life- are themes the band tried to get across in At Their Very Best and Still At Their Very Best,

their two most recent tours. The band plays almost all of Being Funny in the first part of the concert,  but the actual stage show’s themes and theatrics share far more similarities with and seems largely inspired by A Brief Inquiry’s own tracklist, more so than the themes represented in Being Funny. This isn’t to take away from Being Funny at all, one of the best albums of 2022, but to just say that the themes from Brief Inquiry are and have always been ever-present and timeless, as we go further and further into the digital worlds we’ve created for ourselves. A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships is not only the best 1975 album, but one of the best albums ever created. If only the themes and lessons weren’t so prescient five years later.