Anatomy of an Album: A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships

Two days after flying home from six weeks in a Barbados rehab facility, Matty Healy went straight to Abbey Road to produce an EP for his labelmate No Rome. “I didn't want to sit around in my old house where I used to get high, do you know what I mean?” he told Rolling Stone. “I wanted to be doing something positive.” The following January, he and the rest of The 1975 — George Daniel, Adam Hann, and Ross MacDonald — decamped to a studio and spent the next several months making A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, the record that would turn the band from a pop curiosity into, in the words of more than one critic, the millennial answer to OK Computer.

None of that was the plan a year earlier. In an October 2017 conversation with NME, before any of it had happened, Healy sounded like a man dreading his own follow-up: “It's a myth that people make music to be happy,” he said at the time. “My creative pursuit doesn't elicit that much happiness because a lot of the time it's about the darker side of me… it's fucking torture.” By the summer of 2017 he was, by his own later account, smoking heroin regularly. He described the pull of it to Rolling Stone in terms that had nothing to do with rock-star cliché: “It wasn't partying too hard. It was the polarity between connecting with 10,000 people and then going to a hotel room by myself. Mass acceptance and genuine loneliness. It was easier to mediate that with drugs.”

The double album that fell apart, and the one that replaced it

The record was originally going to be called Music for Cars — a title recycled from one of the band's 2013 pre-debut EPs — and posters promoting it went up around London and Manchester in early 2018. But Healy scrapped the single-album plan almost as soon as he started writing, because there was too much to say. As he explained it to NME's Dan Stubbs in their 2018 cover feature, the album that resulted, A Brief Inquiry, would be only the first half of what Music for Cars actually became: an umbrella term for two albums released back to back, this one and 2020's Notes on a Conditional Form. Asked to explain the logic, even Healy struggled: “I suppose if I haven't 100 percent figured it out, no one else is going to,” he admitted.

The actual writing began at a studio Healy had originally scoped out for an abandoned collaboration with grime artist Skepta, in Northampton — a setting about as far from the band's later Hollywood-Hills finishing stretch as it's possible to get. “It's near where all the Spice Girls live and shit like that, it's well nice, proper countryside, dogs everywhere, horses,” Healy told NME. “Very, very kind of Heathcliff vibes.” The band settled in there for roughly six months before finishing work across several studios in Los Angeles.

Rehab, a horse, and getting clean mid-record

The album's emotional center is Healy's recovery, and he's been unusually specific about it rather than leaving it as tabloid subtext. He checked into a facility in Barbados for six weeks of what he's described as intensive cognitive-behavioral therapy, including a form of equine therapy he initially dismissed. “I thought, because I'm a very cynical English person who doesn't believe in energy and vibes and is a sceptic at heart, I thought, fucking hell, what am I going to do? Stand next to a horse for two weeks?” he told NME. What actually happened, three days in, changed his mind entirely: “My therapist takes me into this round pen… and he basically teaches me how to get the horse to trust me in about five minutes. And when it happened, and the horse came up to me and put his thing next to me, and he was just with me for the whole day, feeling safer with me than not, it was the most profound experience I've ever had, because I just got it.”

He's been equally direct about the physical reality of withdrawal, refusing to let it be romanticized. “Physically, it was grim, especially coming off [benzodiazepines],” he told Rolling Stone. “That shit's hard. A week in, I was like, ‘I'm swimming home. Fuck this.’ But I got through it.” He was just as blunt with NME about refusing to let the drug become part of his public identity: “I could never let heroin be part of my identity. Junkies are fucking losers… my desire to be sedated has always been incredibly personal. Like, doing drugs by myself? Yes please.” Staying clean, once home, became a group project rather than a private one — Healy has said he took drug tests in front of his bandmates on his own initiative, not under pressure: “I'd rather remind everybody of the situation we're in once every two weeks or whatever just to have their minds at ease.”

The songs, in their words

More than any 1975 record before or since, Healy has walked through this album's tracklist in granular, on-record detail — largely because so much of it maps directly onto the year he'd just had.

“Love It If We Made It” started as something much smaller than the protest song it became. George Daniel built the instrumental back in 2015; Healy then spent roughly a year collecting daily tabloid headlines to use as lyrics, until the material got “too humorous” and he rewrote it into a snapshot of a specific, volatile political moment, citing Prince's “Sign o' the Times” as a structural model. Healy has described the method plainly: “There's not a lot of context — and a lot of the things that I say in that are kind of direct quotes of people or they're headlines that I've read.” The most contentious line — “I moved on her like a bitch” — is a verbatim quote from Donald Trump, and Healy defended including it without softening: “We've heard the President say that, we know this. This happened… you can't scream ‘Creme Egg!’ and provoke a reaction, but you can scream the truth and it'll maybe reveal a bit more.” The line forced a radio edit.

“Give Yourself a Try,” the lead single, is Healy confronting getting older — and finding it funnier than expected. He's described himself in the song as “a millennial that baby boomers like,” a self-image partly built on an unlikely real friendship with Mick Jagger: “He's still so youth-culture-minded,” Healy told Rolling Stone. “He knows his shit… It's fucking Mick Jagger!” For the video, he told iHeart, he wanted to recapture “the excitement and the kind of frenetic energy that was in ‘Love Me,’” and built the visual around a mirror as “a metaphor for self-reflection.”

“TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME,” co-written with No Rome, was one of the Northampton songs — and, by Healy's own admission, wilfully lightweight next to everything around it: “I'm at a point in my life where I love anything that just makes me feel good,” he told NME, joking about writing bouncy piano-house in the English countryside: “Oh yeah, just like Byron, me.”

“Sincerity Is Scary” is the album's clearest statement of intent, and Healy has explained the philosophy behind it at length — to Zane Lowe on Beats 1, to Genius, and elsewhere, in strikingly consistent terms each time. “Irony is okay. It's fine,” he told Genius. “It's a tried and tested way of not really dealing with stuff. It's harder to be really sincere. It's harder to be soft and vulnerable in the face of earnestness, serious shit. It's easier to be ironic in the face of those situations.” He connected the song directly to noticing his own habits as a lyricist: “I've become so aware of the shtick that exists within my kind of lyrical narrative… I think on this record it's slightly more, it's just a bit more open and a bit easier, and genuinely sincere.” Talking to Dazed around release, he admitted the sincerity-first framing didn't survive contact with the actual songs: “When I started doing interviews for this album campaign… I was very much saying, ‘Oh no, there's no gags on this record, it's really sincere.’ And then I realised, there's loads of gags!”

“It's Not Living (If It's Not with You)” is the album's most direct address of the addiction itself, told partly through a character named Danny, whom Healy has described as living in a “simulation of reality.” Its companion track, “Surrounded by Heads and Bodies,” draws its title from David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and tells the story, in Healy's account, of meeting a woman named Angela in rehab who became a genuine friend.

“I Couldn't Be More in Love” sounds, on first listen, like a conventional soul ballad about a lover. It isn't. Healy told Genius he deliberately dressed it as a love song — “because I love form. I love what makes a love song” — while actually addressing his fans, and his fear of losing them. “If I get it wrong, you don't have many chances in this world,” he said. “It's scary being presented with such an amazing reality. The idea that it can be taken away from you terrifies me, so that's what the song is about.” According to reporting around the album's release, it was recorded the day before Healy entered rehab.

“Mine,” the album's turn into full jazz pastiche, features a trumpet solo from the late Roy Hargrove and draws explicitly on John Coltrane. “Be My Mistake” Healy has described simply as a song about guilt. And the closer, “I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes),” came together differently from almost everything else on the record: written alone, at home, on an acoustic guitar, which Healy called “quite a humble thing” next to the band's usual, more elaborate production process. He's said the opening riff was instantly recognized by the whole band as strong enough to build the rest of the song around.

What it did

The record made The 1975 the first British band since Arctic Monkeys to send their first three albums straight to No. 1 in the UK, and gave them their highest US chart entry to date at No. 4 on the Billboard 200. It holds a Metacritic score of 93 — the highest-rated album of 2018 by that metric, tied with Noname's Room 25 — and was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize (losing to Dave's Psychodrama). At the 2019 Brit Awards, the band won British Album of the Year and British Group, and at that year's Ivor Novello Awards, Healy, Daniel, Hann, and MacDonald won Songwriters of the Year for the record's lyrics.

What the record actually proved, reading the band's own account of making it, wasn't that The 1975 could be serious — they'd always been serious, under the jokes. It's that removing Mike Crossey from the room, and removing heroin from Healy's daily life, happened at the same time, and neither the band nor the songs fell apart. Healy has said as much himself, if not quite in those words: this is the record where being honest stopped being a bit he did between songs, and became the songs.

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