ALBUM: A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships - The 1975
Added 2025-08-16 18:46:58 +0000 UTCclick my collage to get it high quality
link yours below some way or another, love seeing them.
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Album of the August 2025 is The 1975's 2018 release ABIIOR
Beloved by many as a genre spanning insightful celebration of the modern moment, as well as a place where you can feel irritated at Matt Healy if you desire to do so<3
The 1975
This rendition of their album motif melts by fuckking face off everyt ime
Give Yourself A Try
Late twenties anthem, great Joy Division rip off, incredibly hopeful & warm
TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME
Bit of a frenetic phone based ambiguous cheating anthem. its giving gaming the dating apps and monitoring whether or not they've viewed your instagram story.
How To Draw / Petrichor
One of my favourites on the album by a lot, includes the two genders Pretty & Scary, brings back the sub bass vocoder butter harmonizing of the intro track, and unveils the frantic internet paced identity crisis monologue lyricism that will come back in I Like America & America likes me. Not to be dramatic but this is one of those songs that makes me feel intensely that this band has captured what it sounds and feels like to be alive right now lmfaofmasodhhdsoh
As someone who can't draw this just cuts a little deeper on a literal level
[Part I: How to Draw]
I've not learned how to draw x2
What if you die with all of the cameras?[Part II: Petrichor]
Take something and then make it brand new
Try and do anything fourteen times
love yourself like someone you love, one you love
Don't take any of my advice
Write a letter to your future self who won't change
Don't let the internet ruin your time
They can take anything as long as it's true
What they can't take is you telling them lies
Love It If We Made It
To be able to describe something as the We Didn't Start The Fire of the 2010s without a trace of irony speaks for itself. The music video is mandatory viewing material.
Be My Mistake
Yknow that Kanye line where he was like "If you're a Kanye West fan you're not a fan of me you're a fan of yourself". I feel liek Matt Healy kinda functions that way where you are invited to empathize with immature messy low points and feel a bunch of empathy and forgiveness for yourself and others.
Sincerity Is Scary
pro-natal bop
I Like America & America Likes Me
brother if you haven't cried alone listening to this song on repeat with high quality headphones you haven't lived
that crazy thick digital vocal ooze from the intro and How To Draw returns as an autotune anxiety attack. Reads as the thing that is happening in your brain right before you impulsively pick up your phone to self soothe. one of the highlights of the album for me.
The Man Who Married A Robot / Love Theme
Very uncomfortably vivid depiction of what a lot of male lives look like right now. RIP @SnowflakeSmasher86 . Hope you found what you were looking for.
Also appreciate it as a modern reiteration of Fitter Happier.
Inside Your Mind
Monument to violent intimacy, wanting to smash your bae's head open with a rock so you can go inside them and live in their body <3 if you know you know
It's Not Living (If It's Not With You)
we got any users in the house tonight
Surrounded By Heads and Bodies
So simple, so sweet, so gorgeously arranged. Sleeper hit that has become one of my favourites over time.
Mine
Lush jazzy ballad about how like, I don't wanna define what we are, I don't like defintions-
I Couldn't Be More In Love
Really raw Need on display here. Incredible sounding drums.
I heard once that the feeling of grief is love with nowhere to go. This song unlocked for me in a new way when I experienced it in that context. Being mad at someone's departure because they left you with all this Love.
I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)
Comments
a stream of consciousness analysis of cohesion and structure this is a rough album-listening experience for me, mainly for how fickle the band were with their genres and how they cohere (or discohere), but then also seeing the initial raving reviews and kinda strange critical descriptions/other kinds of overgenerous engagement were perplexing. the pitchfork review for example did wonders in promoting this album i think. and like wikipedia says its a maximalist experimental album when it is pretty cleanly pop for the most part. until it starts getting into ambient or acoustic or jazzy tangents. it just feels a bit all over the place. its content is well-meaning and actually pretty tight but the form and instrumental curation is quite unfocused. that being said, there some individual songs that are some of my favourite 75 material, namely 'Love It If We Made It', thought I have been a big fan of them trying out new dynamics when 'How To Draw' first came out and stuff. 'The 1975' - matty stated their self-titled intros are reminiscent of like the playstation boot-up intro and i see how this track functions as such. love how they each vary to stylistically suit the themes of the album their opening. they should've stopped after A Brief Inquiry... though and called their Notes... & Being Funny... intros something else. this is 'The 1975'. 'Gibe Yourself A tRy' - typing too fast not correcting myself. i thought taking the joy division riff was tasteless back in 2018 but with how theyve modified it timbrally its grown on me quite a lot. whilst 'The 1975' was like an intro to form on this album, 'Give Yourself A Try' explores the lyrical angles the album is gonna take. it employs a similar pattern to 'Love It If We Made It' or bo burnham's 'Welcome To The Internet', listing disparate things and qualities, with them all unifying under their purpose for being listed. it's like internet hyperstimulus whilst also covering the addiction theme. in regards to flitting-between genres across the album, you could make a case that it's to mimic this hyperstimulating quality, but the album just doesn't make enough radical jumps / tonal whiplashes for it to properly communicate that intention. but this song is nice. 'TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME' - still struggle with this song eight years on. he wasn't smart fitting in 'ME TOO' into the title like that when the song is hardly about MeToo in the first place. relevant to the tracklist since it's pretty explicitly about Online Relationships, but it's kinda annoying. too bouncy but i like some of no rome's production and the very george daniel faux-sax embellishments at the end. 'How To Draw / Petrichor' - this is one song and you can't really convince me it's two. without 'Petrichor', 'How To Draw' just meanders nowhere. after the experiment / exercise form it took when it initially released in 2016, it feels like a fully fleshed out piece. 'Love It If We Made It' - probably my favourite song from 2018 along with idles' 'Danny Nedelko' and earl sweatshirt's 'Nowhere2go'. idles' song kinda has that aforementioned listing quirk but frames them with a specific and much needed bias. it's about immigrants in britain and how much they uphold current british culture and local communities. 'Nowhere2go' is on the other hand solely on interiority, neatly summarising a lot of earl's mental struggles at the time, underscored by a really tightly woven beat. i'm not really talking about 'Love It If We Made It' because my favourite interpretations have been quite played out already, especially cj's analysis in Bo Burnham vs. Jeff Bezos. i came across a instagram reel the other day that featured the climate clock in new york and it reminded me of how we are only now four years away from the effects of climate change being completely irreversible. i was angry at myself for forgetting about it, for being complacent with verything this destruction gives me, so listening to this song again kept that at the front of my mind, and about hown we're getting closer and closer and closer to not Making It. i think my friends and i are going to die before we can get to have kids. 'Be My Mistake' - took a break writing this because because revisiting 'Love It If We Made It' was intense. i do not like this song. i think in terms of coherence and how to structure an album, it might make sense to have a lower-energy song to come before or after 'Love It If We Made It', but both is a bit strange. if this is on an album about online relationships, i read 'Be My Mistake' as matty exploiting parasociality for attention by posting something on his story so that the attention combats hist "get[ting] lonesome". he writes and has written in the past about non-romantic topics through the framing of a love song, mainly to talk about addiction. therefore i feel reading it this way is plausible. except it isn't heroin its social media-induced dompamine 'Sincerity Is Scary' - uhghghhh what did they do here. the percussion makes the brass sound so bouncy i love it. the keys are very no rome and fit the lax energy quite nicely. i do think it could've been reserved for a slower tempo half of the album, though, pairing well with 'Surrounded By Heads And Bodies' like a nice wine would with your dinner, but it legitimately better scaffolds the abrupt jazz detour of 'Mine'. sincerity is a very necessary topic to cover as irony plagues a lot of relationships, i've just entered a friendship with someone who knows how to have a sincere conversation, but thwey ironically riff an overbearing amount of the time. we're not at the point where i can comment on it yet. it's the healthiest of their handufl of coping mechanisms. sincerity is explored more deeply on their 2022 album 'Being Funny In A Foreign Language'. 'I Like America & America Likes Me' - again, great as a piece by itself, and great as a lyrical contribution to the album, but where does this fit sonically? with the exception of the vocoder, the album doesn't scaffold any of the sounds here. to harmonise cj's reading of this song and my interpretation of 'Be My Mistake', it'd make sense to put this in-between 'Love It If We Made It' and 'Be My Mistake' if the group wanted to index some kinda intention to the structure of A Brief Inquiry... the 'Real World Studios' version fits the sound of the album so much more cohesively, especially if they had retrospectively integrated some instrumental motifs (see next track), but they didn't do that. they did this one. and it sticks out. which makes sense in some ways. as a sonic expeirience less s0. 'The Man Who Married A Robot / Love Theme' - sin siri monologue, this was the first exposure to A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships for many. it featured in several pre-single promotional pieces at the very beginning of the rollout. it was sometimes in reverse, but either way, it has a lot of the timbres carried throughout the rest of the album, like the plinky high pitch disjointed piano, and the string+piano combo we'll hear on the next track, which will be expanded upon with the album closer. to be honest, the cohesion element carries itself tolerably from this point onward, but i'll make it clear when it doesn't. 'Inside Your Mind' - i would've like the plinky piano motif to have been a bit more recurrent, perhaps even the primary motif, as it's only really noticeable in our acoustic addiction-centric songs ('Be My Mistake' and 'Surrounded By Heads And Bodies'). could've fit here. but it's got a lot from 'Love Theme' in it anyway, the pianos and strings carry over (not literally the same melody i'm just talking about instrumental cohesion) nicely, and that buzzsaw riff on the chorus is great. if 'Be My Mistake' is about exploiting the parasocial dynamic with his fans for a little bit of attention online, 'Inside Your Mind' is about being on the other side, and is craving. it's about incels. i'm not sure what it is, but the band put off playing this song live for five years, and Matty looks kinda bored in all the few live recordings that do exist. matty has spoken about relegating his least favourites to the back half of the album (iirc 'This Must Be My Dream' was made out of obligation, and naturally the band don't really care about it enough to want to practice and play it all that much. whihc is ironic lowkey because that does help support the core watery eighties pop identity of I like it when you sleep... but i digress). i just querstion the sincerity they have for this one. is that a fucking nextel chirp 48 seconds in? f1lthy????????? 'It's Not Living (If It's Not With You)' - this is The 1975. 'Surrounded By Heads And Bodies' - i kinda ignored this one on release, it was too reminiscnet of the more boring radiohead tracks and i was obsessed with the higher energy cuts (except 'I Like America...', sorry) to want this. but about a year later i had a dream i saw The 1975 live in this near empty concert hall (which is strnge because i did see them in a very full concert hall night of release in 2018), and they performed this one, and i was kinda gobsmacked like god was there type. and then i did a relisten of their discography to try and figure out what the song was, and i gained a newfound appreciation for 'Surrounded...' tender acoustic guitar is the centre, but its all the embellishments that i think flesh it out for me, including that piano motif. the most unavoidably explicit one about drug addiction and rehabilitAtion, which is a genius theme to pair with social media commentary imo, especially since it comes from a true earnest and personal place in matty's life. i'm gonna stop here because i've written so so much and i don't want to anymore but i could talk about this album for a while because i'm so love/hate with it
yennik arual
2025-10-01 10:34:10 +0000 UTCBegrudgingly happy to represent the person who grew up with this band - to the point where all my artistic output feels like a weird fanfiction born in the space within a particularly nice saxophone solo. With that said, ABIIOR sits in a bit of a tentative spot for me. Like the title suggests, it feels like the point of noticing - that between me and myself there is this third, other, unalive thing intervening in my experience of the world. Not quite as loud and lavish as the neon-charged previous album, and not a thorough dismantling of on- and off-line reality as the next one tries to be. ABIIOR feels like that moment when you first step outside of yourself after a particularly long tweet-exchange only to ask - who was that? It has the fear and the subsequent fight against the unknown Big Bad, a water-oil kind of flirting with one’s own pushful emotions and it’s just… so good man. Layering the quietest moments in life with the loudest frightfully raw thoughts are something The 1975 excel at, I feel. Like the comment above, I was 17 when I was slamming my door shut to blast I Like America & America Likes Me like it was personal - I was well and truly on the other side of the world. It jammed itself right into that phase when me and my friends were starting to fear not having a future, every 'would you please listen?' melting my generation and the people behind the trigger into two giant blobs that would fail to recognise all of themselves before they could ever reach out across the line. Years later, the live session version brought me that same knees-to-floor instinct. Highly recommend. https://youtu.be/CZvF2YEkA_Q
Carol N.
2025-08-23 23:42:03 +0000 UTC
