The 1975, A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships, review: A coherent pop statement

The band’s best album yet has enough hope, radical honesty and genre-spanning breadth to make sense across divided generations

The Manchester band’s self-produced third LP has the range of an intimate mixtape

Quiz Matty Healy on his musical influences and he’ll reel off lots of Nineties emo and Sixties soul icons. In his grand themes and squeamish honesty, though, lies a more familiar kinship.

Like Bloc Party singer Kele Okereke, Healy operates on full throttle at a curious intersection: the beleaguered pop philosopher issuing big proclamations with disarming optimism. Both balance indictments of modern life with a delirious faith in modern people.

But on their third and best album, A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships, The 1975 have created what so many post-Radiohead bands couldn’t: a coherent pop statement with enough hope, radical honesty and genre-spanning breadth to make sense across divided generations.

Rather than a haphazard Spotify playlist, the self-produced LP has the range of an intimate mixtape. Indie-pop zinger “Give Yourself a Try” rips into tropical house dalliance “TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME”, before a diversion through Postal Service nostalgia on “How to Draw / Petrichor”. Moments of jazz, Soulquarian R&B and histrionic stadium rock backdrop Healy’s boyish pleas about romantic anxiety, the bliss and torment of addiction, and the infernal state of world affairs.

Resolutions seldom materialise, because Healy wants something else – a space to sing what he pleases, to shrink his reality into compact pop songs that pose extravagant questions and answer only one: if we know the size and shape of the inferno, can we at least celebrate the thought it will one day be extinguished?

To make his case, the 29-year-old presents “Love It If We Made It”. Within its pop-funk whirlpool are allusions to the refugee crisis, deceased rapper Lil Peep, Black Lives Matter and the prison industrial complex, Trump’s sexual assault scandal and his comradeship with Kanye West, and – in the unbroadcastable opening line – Healy’s recent heroin addiction.

The collage experiment is akin to handing cult documentarian Adam Curtis the contents of your infernal Twitter feed, locking him in a dark room and demanding he make it sound better than life itself.

As with all of The 1975’s escapades, it ought to be a disaster. Instead, the showpiece triumphs as an unlikely paragon of social media-era pop. In a glass bottle, tamed and ridiculed, the inferno is strangely beautiful.

Hubris tends to work in Healy’s favour, though not always. While blunt asides and self-deprecation remain welcome foils, he’s now diving the deeps of sincerity, into territory unchartered outside the Tumblr meme community.

If acoustic lament “Be My Mistake” is reassuringly plainspoken, only the hardiest fans will relish a pair of eyebrow-raising admissions: “You make me hard but she makes me weak ... The smell of your hair reminds me of her feet.” For “The Man Who Married a Robot”, Healy – on a tightrope between satire and self-parody – has Siri narrate a parable about a lonely, porn-loving internet addict named @SnowflakeSmasher86, who lives between dopamine hits from Deliveroo and Facebook and then quietly dies.

Now and then his scampish vulnerability will airlift precarious lyrics to safety. On “Sincerity Is Scary”, he groans: “Instead of calling me out/ You should be drawing me in,” faintly evoking a Twitter troll bemoaning their evisceration. But Healy’s dumb, nothing-to-hide charm deters scrutiny.

The most remarkable transformation is that pop flings like “TOOTIME”, once the 1975’s bread and butter, are now dwarfed by the brainier excursions.

Artists seeking profound relevance now tend to cite David Foster Wallace, whose writing on visual-media immersion and the scourge of irony has lassoed a generation of teenagers.

Of all the songwriters to interpret these ideas – Father John Misty and Alex Turner are the latest – Healy may be the most faithful, if only for his rejection of the author’s great adversaries: solipsism and the retreat in art from compassion.

Wallace foresaw our descent from individualism into an apolitical belief that all a person can change is themselves. Healy, against the current, is an outward believer too: that the righteous and the rest, exhausted and imperfect, will amble through the inferno towards an unlikely redemption.

He promises nothing, but he’d love it if we made it.