The 1975 - 10th Anniversary Edition Vinyls

It’s taken me about a year to process NOACF. It was an album that had an unbelievable amount of hype and after the success of ABIIOR, no one knew which direction they would go in. What we ended up with is an expansive, eighty minute experimental album that fuses elements of electronica, country, indie rock and house music. It was deliberately advertised as a companion to ABIIOR and while many expected it to be a continuation, it took a completely opposite direction sonically and a more refined approach thematically. Upon its release it struck an immediately polarizing reaction from fans and critics. If you were disappointed by this album, hear me out. 

First off, let’s get this out of the way. Is NOACF their best album? No. Is it a bad album? Far from it. I personally believe that ABIIOR dealt with some of these ideas in a more concise manner, but the problem with comparing the two is that NOACF asks different questions and speaks on its themes with a very different process. I genuinely don’t think you can measure them up side by side. ABIIOR took an external, outward approach to its content, while NOACF inverts itself and returns to the bands internal musical approach. The biggest difference here, NOACF asks you to understand it more-so sonically than lyrically. Never before have the band relied this heavily on their ambient sounds and instrumental motifs to tell a story. Where there once was an abundance of 80s new wave inspired pop songs, there is now an ever changing ambient soundscape asking you to listen in a different way. 

Lyrically, NOACF is not so focused on the intricacies of our lives affected by an online presence like on ABIIOR, yet there is still plenty of its lingering challenges to be found here. NOACF is an inward reflection of frontman Matty Healy’s anxiety. This is an album about thoughts, questions and miscommunication inflicted by political failings, mental health, atheism, and living with uncertainty. It shares many of the same sentiments as their previous records, but does so with a simpler link to Healy’s personal life. We hear about his search for meaning in Nothing Revealed/Everything Denied, his struggle with uncertainty on Playing On My Mind, and declining mental health on I Think There’s Something You Should Know. This album is a more ambiguous, broader statement about youth culture and relationships, it’s even more relevant when placed in the context of its time: 2020. A year of tumultuous events and precariousness. What The 1975 are talking about on this record correlate closely with the worries and conflicts of the modern age, with a slightly more personalized touch. We heard such outward statements about love and post-modern sentiments on ABIIOR, now NOACF casually references examples in Healy’s life when he has encountered that contention. 

Sonically, this album explores niche genres of music that many fans may find abrasive. I think it was easier for fans to digest the more mainstream sounds they were playing with on previous albums, but this one takes a deep dive into truly alternative and experimental music. This album is not trying to appeal to anything they’ve done before. Roadkill embraces a full on country guitar, People is the heaviest rock song they’ve made and Yeah I Know is entirely carried by a few lyrics with a ticking snare. A large portion of this album is dedicated to house/electronic music, which half of those songs have little to no lyrics. There are obvious nods to artists such as Burial and Jon Hopkins, who may be new to those who can recognize more familiar influences like Bowie, Joy Division or Radiohead. They play with styles of music and rhythms that aren’t commonly found in modern pop music, but definitely have made their mark in smaller communities of music listeners. Shiny Collarbone is one of the most shining examples of a heavy dance track that is as equally valuable as any of their more lyrically heavy tracks. Its pulsing beat and weaving synths create an undeniably interesting movement in the mix and I can’t help but worry that many fans will not understand what they were trying to do with song like this, What Should I Say and Having No Head. 

Despite the mixed reactions, NOACF received praise for its adventurousness and genre bending. I don’t think as many people realized how well received this album was in the music community and the music they made on this project gained them a respectable amount of credibility. I believe that this album will age well and be looked back upon as being one of their greatest. It’s not only a momentous effort in pushing their sound but a monumental practice in refining it. They sound the best they ever have and I think you will find their hallmark messages told in a masterful way on this record. Their sentiments on love, addiction, uncertainty and anxiety could easily be misplaced as being shallow when they’ve actually done a good job at homing in on their ideas in a minimalistic way. 

If you liked ABIIOR, you might agree. If you didn’t, hear me out! The more time passes, the stronger I feel towards claiming that A Brief Inquiry is not only a milestone album for this band but an undeniably fit assessment of our current culture. Years from now, when my kids want to understand how young people were thinking in the era of the Donald Trump administration, the attempted defamation of journalism/media and the evolving social motives prompted by iPhones, I will give them this record. I think this record speaks more deeply than many will admit, especially closer fans of The 1975 who found this record to be abrasive. I think this album says more than both of the previous two and here is why:

Give Yourself A Try immediately sets the tone, both a tongue-in-cheek call out to ‘self love’ culture and simultaneously questions how we continue to adapt with our generation’s anxieties. It’s an obvious reference to Joy Division’s Disorder and I’m unsure if the message of the song is too, as Joy Division’s own Ian Curtis struggled with his declining health, leading to him taking his own life in 1980. Matty writes about “your vinyl and your coffee collection” as being a status of your age and then admits he was “afraid to go outside.” The 1975 are capitals on finding the balance between poking fun at the intricacies of modern living and then contrasting them with intimate critiques at how we self deprecate and isolate our own emotions. That is what this record is about, Give Yourself A Try is its thesis. 

TOOTIME is both a parody of the now tired topical house pop and an unashamed revelry within it, all about the flimsy art of lying. The song knows it’s annoying in its repetition and it fully embraces this as it’s simply about the hollowness of how we define cheating, affairs and flirting through online interfaces. This song knows exactly what it is and asks you to accept it and then dance. It questions a modern pop trope and makes you ask yourself, do I care? Sincerity is Scary is the most direct critique of post-modern self awareness and how we undercut honesty with humor. It has become easier for us to joke about our feelings than to admit them truly. “Irony’s okay, culture is to blame.” There is no harm in masking pain in humor but there is no purpose in hiding how we feel all the time. We are limiting our expression when we put down our own ability to be vulnerable and even more so when we put down others.

How To Draw/Petrichor is an ambient/garage track that melds genres and tells us that “they can take anything as long as it’s true, what they can’t take is you telling them lies,” a brutally honest build on what we’ve heard in TOOTIME. You can’t listen to this album without considering the time Matty spent in rehab for his drug addiction right before the recording of this album. This song is kin with Surrounded By Heads and Bodies, a ghostly acoustic track about a woman he met during his time there. It’s a calling out to someone you can’t fix, someone who is in a deep depression, a state of health many young people are finding themselves in as we learn more about it. It must be hard to witness a person in this state of mind, while in the midst of trying to help your own. It’s Not Living( If It’s Not With You) seems to cap this trilogy and faces the dependency on hard drugs set to an uplifting choir-ensued chorus. This song is blissfully 80s and seemingly about not being able to separate yourself from a lifeline. There is something so large about pain that only such uplifting chords can match it. These songs all feel like intimate portraits of navigating mental health in our age, what we do to cope and how we choose to help ourselves.

Love It If We Made It is the 2018 rendition of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start The Fire. It is a harsh collection of headline events of the beginning of the Trump Era, a similar wall of information that we encounter every day now on our screens. This bombarding of information just feels like the paranoia and anxiety of dealing with the challenging issues that paralyze us day to day. Also a nod to the Situationist movement of the 1960s (the poetry is in the streets), a repeated reference within The 1975. “Poison me daddy” and “I moved on her like a bitch” are both said in this song, a reminder of how information now gets diluted into memes and internet humor. We take the gravity of meaning and transform it into a form suitable for humor, also spoken to on Sincerity.

I Like America. “When you bleed, say so we know.” America does not want to admit there are problems until blood is spilled, specifically a still ongoing debate on gun control. Nothing on the rest of the record sounds as desperate and confused. It sits in the middle of the album and it can barely get a full thought out. The autotune underlines the eerie severity of the message, as if it’s coming from an anonymous congregation of people begging for help. This song is insane, it is the most modern sounding and most ambitious. It asks for a different mode of understanding a song, through flashes of uninterpretable noises, its title referencing a performance piece by Joseph Beuys in 1974, equally as absurd. 

The Man Who Married a Robot is a direct reference to Radiohead’s Fitter Happier, but modernized and spoken by iPhone’s Siri. It’s a song I’m sure most will skip, but is a disturbing portrait of someone’s dependency on the internet, how we can live our entire lives with a screen. This is an unnerving reality we tend to look away from. Though the story here sounds dramatic, it isn’t far from the amount of time we spend on our phones and computers now. How will this dependency evolve in the coming years or even 50 years?  

Be My Mistake, Mine and I Couldn’t Be More in Love contemplate relationships and how we navigate them with the presence of new technological and social presences. Mistake, on the guilt felt from affairs. Mine, on the comfort of not needing to define a relationship with traditional institutions like marriage. I Couldn’t Be, on the feelings one is left with after someone leaves a relationship. These all talk about modern challenges framed in the context of abundance in relationship options and the value of choice within them. Choice of how to feel, how to want and how to let go. 

I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes). The album ends with an unfinished answer to its thesis. The album starts by asking to “give yourself a try” and ends by saying “if you can’t survive, just try.” Against the immediate and greatly contrasting ideologies that modern technology have brought to our communication methods, you just need to try. Try to engage, to feel. To understand the ways we avoid facing hard truths, whether they be political, social, emotional, etc. This album is about learning to reflect, how to understand the external world and its place in our internal processing during a time of information overload. The internet is giving us ways to speak, as well as hide. The 1975 are asking us not to close ourselves off, but to find ways to speak out against the adversity and self deprecation. 

Music For Cars by The 1975 (2018-2021)