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Dec 3, 2018There's so much going on in this record, but it's far from a case of throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks. A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships is a considered, ambitious album from a band who are constantly pushing themselves.
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Nov 30, 2018A tone of urgent honesty pulses through the album, a visceral need to connect that shatters the production's glittering surfaces.
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Nov 29, 2018It has a daft title, and a few daft songs with hammy lyrics. It has variety, diversity and its heart on its sleeve. It has pretence, artifice and ambition. It has, basically, everything.
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Q MagazineNov 20, 2018A Brief Inquiry... feel not just hugely entertaining and moving, but necessary. [Jan 2019, p.104]
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Nov 20, 2018The band put their flag in the ground as the most intriguing musical voice we have, creating a bombastic, immaculately put together portrait of modern life.
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Nov 20, 2018A magpie pop masterpiece that could only be made right now and right here. And for every stupid joke you’ve heard about avocados and house prices and safe spaces and jazz hands, this is a piece of art that shows another side to a generation, one of achievement, wit and humanity in the most confusing of times.
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Nov 23, 2018The 1975 don’t presume to have all the answers, but their sincerity and vulnerability make for a tremendous record that speaks to the state we live in. It’s their best work yet.
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Nov 28, 2018The 1975’s frequently dazzling exploration of life in the iOS era, frontman Matty Healy turns the mic over to--who else?--Siri. Narrating a strangely touching fable about a man in love with the Internet, the bot contributes one of a great many moments on the album.
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Nov 26, 2018By interrogating the strategies we employ to keep on living in an impossible world, this astonishing album has become one.
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Dec 17, 2018You may feel the urge to dismiss them as pretentious or pompous, but if you can resist that impulse, A Brief Inquiry... soon reveals itself to be full of genuine heart, intelligence and wit. This is a band who want to be the best of their generation. They might not be there yet, but it is incredible to hear them come close.
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Nov 29, 2018The members of the 1975 began playing together in their teens as an emo band, and they are still interested in wringing out unadulterated feeling from everything they touch. This is the thread that grounds even their most dubious dabblings, and makes their dilettantism amount to more than a series of stunts.
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Nov 26, 2018A Brief Inquiry is a record of substance that manages to both poke fun at and be a product of its time. The 1975 might be white-boys with guitars, but they're so much more than that.
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Dec 11, 2018This is a content-saturated album for a content-saturated world. Here, there’s real substance and there’s total fluff, and it’s up to us to find out what’s worth listening to.
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Dec 6, 2018Though A Brief Inquiry is just as dizzying and disorienting as 2016’s heroically omnivorous i love it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it, the 1975 take themselves a little more seriously now.
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Dec 3, 2018Overall, it’s not as gleeful as their last one, but melodic light relief abounds, as on the Belinda Carlisle outtake that is It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You). Those conclusions feel earned, not merely hashtagged.
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Nov 30, 2018It veers wildly among mechanized garage rock, ’80s-era soft pop, atmospheric dance music and lush acoustic balladry; one song strongly recalls Justin Bieber’s “Sorry,” while another looks back to the Great American Songbook. ... Excellent, often thrilling album.
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Nov 29, 2018As 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.
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Nov 29, 2018It’s the points at which A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships veers away from the preset aesthetic that feel the most profound.
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Nov 28, 2018It's their willingness to fall flat on their face while swinging for the fences that separates them from the focus-grouped inoffensiveness of their pop peers. The messiness of the whole thing seems to be the point, part of its audacity. In most artists' hands, that would be a recipe for creative bloat. Yet more than ever before the 1975 prove themselves masters of the form.
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MojoNov 20, 2018It's not tidy, but fittingly for such unabashed pop maximalists, there's a lot to love here. [Jan 2019, p.84]
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Nov 30, 2018Great albums don’t need to define a generation or open doors to other worlds, they just need to make great music--and Inquiry does exactly that. It’s a batch of quality pop songs--nothing more, nothing less.
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Nov 30, 2018For good or for ill, The 1975 have mastered the 2018 sound—a hyper-sweet confectionary of computer rhythms and dance beats and electro-breath echoes that is the hallmark of far too many albums. But underneath the puffy synthetics, they’ve also proven themselves capable of real rawness, an album for the good times as well as the tough.
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UncutJan 2, 2019Multidimensional. ... This rotating playlist of styles and sincerity will rankle with some--it's very earnest about addiction, love and our internet selves--but rather that than banal conformity. [Feb 2019, p.23]
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Dec 4, 2018The 1975 take on that overwhelming anxiety with nerve and aplomb, and the result combines the fist-raising inspired by anthems with the gut-punch provided by precisely described longing.
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Nov 30, 2018It's far-reaching in scope but it's also conceptually uniform, a beautiful mess of an album from a band who is inching their way towards the imperial phase of their career.
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Nov 26, 2018It’s romantic, existential, frantic, and disorganised, and that ultimately strange mix of tones, genres, and production all adds into a singular esthetic. Nonetheless, it’s hard to ignore its shortcomings, and it is all too easy to rue what might have been, as there are moments of brilliance here that are too often cut short by an unnecessary lull in artistic reinvention.
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Nov 30, 2018Despite the often bleak themes at play on the album, there's also a refreshing hopefulness on many of the tracks that speaks to Healy's own recovery and willingness to say yes to even the most frothy pop trend. However, taken as a whole, the album is often as disparate and difficult to wade through as the social-media landscape it hopes to comment on.
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Jan 14, 2019Even as only the first half of a delayed double album, A Brief Inquiry already feels like a classically bloated example of the form.
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Dec 17, 2018Some of the arrangements wouldn't be that bad if they hadn't been sampled and sequenced to death. But if over-producing the life out of something is one thing, any use of the dreaded Auto-Tune facility is another. It runs through A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships like the plague to the point where numerous listens later I still have no idea what Matty Healy's actual singing voice sounds like.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 246 out of 294
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Mixed: 24 out of 294
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Negative: 24 out of 294
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Nov 30, 2018
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Nov 30, 2018
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Dec 1, 2018