Some music blooms when it is most essential, feeding the soul with the pastel noise it’s spent months yearning for, offering a special intimacy where the heart is stripped away from its aura of pride, egotism and obliviousness and is exposed.
An album flowed through earbuds as I sat over a salted caramel latte I couldn’t actually afford alongside a pile of study materials I didn’t quite comprehend. In the moment, I felt as though I was finally facing a kaleidoscope mirror of my current and future selves.
I’m discussing the 1975’s “A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships.”
While individuals are unique and offer their own musical preferences, I cannot resist the urge to celebrate this album as one of the most gorgeous, enlightening and especially heartbreaking masterworks to sprout out of the confusion of 2018.
The album commences with a self-titled introduction.
In an interview with Pitchfork Media Inc., lyricist Matthew Healy said he created the introduction two days prior to the record’s final deadline, after asking himself, “Why don’t I go in the booth on the piano, and then maybe we manipulate it and see if anything interesting happens.”
As I read this interview, I couldn’t help compare it to the life I’m constantly longing toward. It embodied my aspirations to live each day with a mind submerged in curiosity and openness to a rattling unknown.
It transitions to “Give Yourself a Try,” where Healy addresses challenges with self-love and acceptance, which makes the later spoken word track “The Man Who Married a Robot/Love Theme” a challenging piece to absorb.
In it, listeners are obligated to reflect on the “bad vibes” associated with living in the digital age. During this moment, we prefer the items serving us, as opposed to the people coexisting with us.
While evaluating his final product during the interview, Healy said “I am really just asking questions. What’s weird to me is the stuff that we just get used to.”
English pop rock band, the 1975 has always managed to prettify my life since the release of their self-titled album in 2013.
In my nautical-themed hometown of Saint Clair Shores, Michigan, listening to the band religiously insured one’s status as a neon-highlighted hipster with a brain full of crystals.
You would jam to upbeat songs like “Chocolate” and “She’s American” during April drives toward Midtown Detroit.
Aging automobiles, traced out by rust and California daydreams, would shimmer as they cruised alongside the curves of Lake St. Clair.
While the sun shimmered and projected holy promises of summer vacation, Lake Shore youths would blow bubbles out the window and discuss their undying love and devotion to Healy.
I remember romanticizing the lives of my high school’s most whimsical clique, the Floof Gang.
They would dedicate their Friday nights to dancing beneath a disco ball in the Homecoming King’s basement, twirling to the 1975’s music and entering a dimension far groovier than the one I was living in.
I waited two days before committing to listening to “A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships.”
An enormous part of me didn’t want to face their inevitable growth as an ensemble. I longed for them to remain as a sacred treasure protected by the purities and easiness of my youth.
Subconsciously, I wanted them to stay locked in my friend’s 2010 Honda CR-V, where only worries of exhausting swim team practices and beating the 11 p.m. curfew existed.
Their new album wasn’t a dream, but a reality presented so soothingly it shattered my heart.
The album explores Healy’s life of heroin addiction-a narrative that would typically serve as a rock’n’roll cliche but is illustrated as a collage made vibrant by themes of longing, extreme lust, devastation and disappointment and the apocalyptic inevitabilities promised my humanity’s tendency of loving only the satisfaction delivered instantly to them.
While I cannot relate to a life sprinkled under the use of heroin and other infamous rock star drugs, I have found this semester to be a phase of addiction.
I am addicted to attention, seeking surface-leveled love and avoiding my responsibilities in an attempt at being a free spirit. Each of these were realities the album made me face, despite my desperation to hide behind the naivety I outgrew two years ago.
“Sincerity is Scary” boomed into my ears and I was immediately forced to watch myself pursue numerous scenarios promising nothing but heartache with over-glorified willingness.
While this was beautiful, I felt my heart crinkle like shredded confetti paper-dazzling but hungry for something much better for myself.
In conclusion, this album inspires spiritual awakening and exposure to energies that aren’t always stunning but are made lovely by their powers to help individuals eventually gleam outside the anguish they have fallen so helplessly infatuated with.