10 Best Pop Albums Of 2018
3. The 1975 - A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships
Matty Healy’s brazen contradictions and complications as a songwriter are again showcased in an album that simultaneously engulfs the soul with the pace of a forest fire then blackens the brain like the dud and dulled match-head that started the blaze. The wild meandering undertaking is epic in scale, however, because it’s all The 1975 now seem capable of. "A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships" is, subsequently, an irresistible and iridescent triumph.
Audacious comparisons to other acts could be made through experimentations with electronica, dance and jazz, but why tie other artists to The 1975 when the The 1975 clearly need only themselves for inspiration. The album is loaded with groundbreaking gesticulations about love and other drugs, as singer Healy grapples with his two biggest vices whilst simultaneously working on a self-effacing emotional unravelling.
In that regard, he has captured the bittersweet tonic of life’s hardest challenges and how they yield the most satisfying rewards. Survive the woozy succour of How To Draw/Petrichor and you’ll eventually be gifted the addicted and addicted anthem It’s Not Living If It’s Not With You. Grit your teeth at the pernicious and precocious Be My Mistake and the sublime Sincerity Is Scary awaits just seconds later as reward to right the wrongs.
More “okay Google” than OK Computer, The Man Who Married A Robot is a kindergarten-quality lament about technology’s ills so painfully on the f*cking nose it might as well have been ripped from Michael Jackson’s cadaver. However, Love It If We Made It is, in contrast, an MJ-sized masterpiece. A masterpiece. Tackling the dystopian isolation and destruction of capitalism through the prism of (what else?) sex and drugs - though the absurdly fierce opening salvo would make even the palest faced incarnation of ‘The King Of Pop’ blush.
Never content with being remembered as just this decade’s indie pop darlings, The 1975 have instead transcended the genre and the industry at large. Ill-reflected as "just" the most vital big arena band of their time, their continuous journey to the centre of what's left of this earth remains endlessly fascinating to explore alongside them.