Healy's voice has never sounded more masculine or daunted than on the piano ballad 'Inside Your Mind.' A jagged guitar line evokes a slow death while Healy sorrowfully lays his love on the table for someone who can't provide the answers he sorely needs. The album is unrelenting with moments like this. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. “Believe and say something” is the momentum that keeps you going through those nights. with nothing but a dirty kebab and Burial's Untrue for company. The chorus reminds me of my twenties in London, riding the bus back to suburbia at 1 a.m. When you're young and making it in the world, a fiver might not get you much, but the short change will light a fire under your ass. “What's a fiver? Being young in the city / Believe and say something,” he pleads. The song is a shocking reflection of how America's youth feel going to school every day in the year of the Parkland shooting. “I'm scared of dying!” he cries at the beginning of 'I Like America & America Likes Me,' a rebellion against his own mortality. The key to A Brief Inquiry is that it couldn't be more reactive to 2018 unless Healy had finished it at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve (which is probably why he's already working on the follow-up, Notes on a Conditional Form). Aren't you tired of being part of a society that always has to apologize for itself? That always has to humbly lower its head in appeasement of its elders in order to offend the minimum number of people? A Brief Inquiry is about what's around the corner, and what's outside right now. The best songs are the ones that tell the future, not the past. We don't need to be retromaniacs in order to laud this album. But anyone else who's ever picked up a guitar or sat at a piano does. The Beatles don't have to contend with their own legacy in 2018, 55 years after they recorded Meet the Beatles! (though McCartney will happily talk about it all if you ask him). They determined what a pop band should look, sound, and perform like. Boyz II Men (there has to be a choreographed stool moment for that key change on 'I Couldn't Be More in Love')Īs for the Beatles comparisons (apparently the band is this generation's Lennon and McCartney), well, the Beatles never had to manipulate the form and hit refresh because they invented the form.To that point, I've compiled a list of everything A Brief Inquiry reminds me of. They want all the genres they grew up on. Healy wants to give the people what they want because it's also what he wants, and it's what his bandmates want. Healy wants to embrace your methods of consumption. Radiohead is anti–the-thing-you-are-doing. (Maybe he does deep down and this is why Thom Yorke cannot be trusted.) Radiohead hates The Man. Thom Yorke is probably sitting on a mountain of 'It's Not Living (If It's Not with You)''s, but he doesn't want to be The 1975. Let me tell you something about Radiohead: Thom Yorke has done everything in his power to evade the term “pop” over the course of three decades.

Before any of that echo-chamber applause, The 1975 had already made the album of the year by doing exactly what they wanted to do for 15 years predating all this. Cultural gatekeepers who once relished berating the band for the past however many years found themselves in agreement (some begrudgingly so): The 1975 are the best band on earth. The author Caitlin Moran invited Healy to her home in North London to be interviewed by her daughters as part of a cover story for the Times of London. NME-a magazine that called The 1975 “worst band in the world” four years ago-practically turned itself into a 1975 fan account in the build-up and aftermath. They scored Best New Music on Pitchfork (gaining a whole two points since their 6.5-rated sophomore album, I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it). Whether it was BBC radio takeovers or in-store signings at record stores in their hometown of Manchester, the group's four members (Healy, Adam Hann, George Daniel, and Ross MacDonald) were on a campaign war trail. The band's entire label team at Dirty Hit, a record company run jointly with Healy, was working around the clock without sleep. Listening parties were held in cities on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. Last month, the Manchester group The 1975 put out their third album- A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships, one of GQ's favorite records of the year-and it was a global event that no other band consisting of four white dudes with guitars (frontman Matt Healy's words, not mine) could dare to dream of right now.

The 1975 album cover the 1975