Will 2019 be the year for The 1975?
THE 1975: A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships (Polydor) Verdict: Pop at its most ambitious CLEAN BANDIT: What Is Love? (Atlantic) Verdict: Machine-tooled dance ★★★★★ ★★★✩✩
TWO songs into The 1975’s new album, singer Matty Healy delivers a lighthearted assessment of the Cheshire quartet’s generation-spanning appeal, describing himself as ‘a millennial that babyboomers like’.
Powered by a drum machine and a guitar riff that echoes Joy Division’s Disorder, the song goes on to tell listeners to ignore the foibles of fashion and simply be themselves.
It’s sound advice, laying down guidelines that Healy, 29, and his three bandmates stick to wholeheartedly on an album that addresses the impact of technology on human interaction in an age where complex feelings are often reduced to snappy soundbites on social media.
A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships is The 1975 at their most ambitious. It features songs that reprise the glossy, Duran Duran-style synth-pop of their two previous albums, both of which topped the charts, but it also contains acoustic detours, supper-club jazz and middle-ofthe-road ballads that could make them a Heart FM staple.
Lasting almost an hour, it’s a sprawling affair. There are glitchy interludes that disrupt the flow, but as their fondness for preposterous album titles suggests — this is a sequel to 2016’s I Like It When You Sleep For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It — brevity has never been the band’s strongest suit.
You can forgive them their indulgences when they have a singer as interesting as Healy, an indie-rock pin-up who admits to being a little messed up. The son of actors Denise Welch and Tim Healy, he met the rest of the band at Wilmslow High School in 2002 and has been with them ever since.
Now thankfully clean after entering rehab in Barbados last year to conquer a wretched heroin addiction, his energy never flags.
The album is front-loaded with catchy, hook-heavy anthems. With Healy co-producing alongside drummer George Daniel, Too Time Too Time Too Time glitter sand shimmers. Love It If We Made It is built around a stream of tweets and catchphrases, leaving the listener wondering whether the punchline ‘modernity has failed us’ is Healy’s verdict on the online world or simply another random slogan.
He confronts his past drug use unflinchingly on It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You) and unites with the London Community Gospel Choir on Sincerity Is Scary. But the real surprises arrive towards the end.
Mine is a beautifully sung jazz number on which Healy contemplates the prospect of turning 30 next year, and I Couldn’t Be More In Love is an epic ballad, complete with tasteful guitar solo and dramatic key change. It could be Michael Bolton or Whitney Houston.
There’s an argument that A Brief Inquiry...would be improved by some judicious editing, but that somehow wouldn’t feel right for a band whose instinctive approach has also yielded several brilliant new songs. Maybe fans should curate their own personal playlists.
Healy shows no sign of slowing down: a dance-orientated companion to this album, Notes On A Conditional Form, is out next spring.
n CLEAN BANDIT have become one of pop’s most reliable hit machines since topping the charts in 2014 with Rather Be and their second album reiterates their strengths as a good singles act who fall short in the art of creating coherent long players.
ON THEIR early releases, the band perfected a quirky fusion of classical instrumentation and electronic dance, but those idiosyncrasies have unfortunately been ironed out.
As a rather faceless trio, cellist Grace Chatto and the Patterson brothers Jack and Luke rely on guest vocalists to give their music personality and it’s hard to deny their tactic’s effectiveness.
The first four tracks have all been singles, three of them chart-toppers, with Symphony sung by Zara Larsson and Rockabye featuring AnneMarie and Sean Paul. Baby and Solo are fuelled by voguish Latin beats. Elsewhere, Rita Ora reiterates what a strong vocalist she is and Iowa singer Julia Michaels, who cowrote Ora’s Keep Talking, impresses on I Miss You.
The most distinctive touch, however, is from Craig David, who teams up with ex-Voice contestant Kirsten Joy on the reflective We Were Just Kids.
n The 1975 start a tour on January 9 at the SSe Arena, Belfast (ticketmaster.co. uk). Clean Bandit play Capital FM’s Jingle Bell Ball at the O2 Arena, London, on December 9 (axs.com).