The record that stopped critics treating them as a joke

None of this 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, describing his creative process as something closer to torture than joy. By the summer of 2017 he was, by his own later account, using heroin regularly — describing the pull of it not as rock-star excess but as a way of mediating the whiplash between performing for ten thousand people and then sitting alone in a hotel room afterward. He entered a Barbados rehab facility for six weeks of intensive therapy. Two days after flying home, rather than return to the house where he used to get high, he went directly to Abbey Road Studios to produce an EP for labelmate No Rome. The following January, he and the rest of the band — George Daniel, Adam Hann, and Ross MacDonald — decamped to a studio to begin what became A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships.

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

The record was originally going to be a single album 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. Healy scrapped the single-album plan almost as soon as he started writing, because there was simply too much material to say it in one record. What resulted was 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. Even Healy has struggled to fully explain the internal logic of the split, admitting plainly that if he hadn't figured it out completely, nobody else was going to either. The actual writing began at a studio in Northampton originally scoped out for an abandoned collaboration with grime artist Skepta — about as far from the band's later Hollywood finishing stretch as it's possible to get.

For the first time, no outside producer

Every previous 1975 album had Mike Crossey in the room. This one didn't. Healy and George Daniel produced it entirely themselves, with Jonathan Gilmore engineering. Adam Hann has explained the shift plainly: the band's first two records were co-productions with Crossey, but for the third and fourth, they wanted to work more like the artists they'd become, and needed a genuinely new energy in the session. It's worth noting how this decision sits inside the band's larger production arc, now that this library has covered all five of their albums: Crossey shaped the sound for the first two records, the band produced the next two entirely alone, and an outside collaborator returned only in 2022, with Jack Antonoff — a full six years after Crossey last worked with them.

Getting clean mid-record

The album's emotional center is Healy's recovery, and he's been unusually specific about it in interviews rather than leaving it as tabloid subtext — including candid, unromanticized accounts of how physically difficult early withdrawal was. Staying clean once he returned home became something closer to a group project than a private struggle: Healy has said he began taking drug tests in front of his bandmates on his own initiative, simply to put everyone's mind at ease every couple of weeks, rather than waiting to be asked.

That directness carries into the songwriting. "Love It If We Made It" started as a 2015 George Daniel instrumental that Healy spent roughly a year filling with lyrics built largely from real headlines and direct quotes he'd collected — citing Prince's "Sign o' the Times" as a structural model for stitching disparate current events into a single song. One line, a verbatim quote from a sitting U.S. president, was contentious enough to force a radio edit; Healy has defended keeping it in on the grounds that the song works by stating documented fact rather than commentary. "Sincerity Is Scary," built on the choral vocal-stacking technique this library has already traced through George Daniel's method, is the album's clearest statement of purpose — Healy's own attempt to write past the ironic distance he'd noticed becoming a lyrical habit, even while admitting, once the songs were finished, that plenty of jokes had snuck back in anyway.

What it did

The album won a Brit Award for Album of the Year and earned a Mercury Prize shortlist nomination — genuine critical validation for a band that had spent years being written off as disposable pop. It debuted at No. 1 in the UK and No. 4 in the US. Read against everything that came before it, A Brief Inquiry reads less like a stylistic pivot than a document of a specific, difficult year finally being allowed onto the record without a joke to soften it — the first time this band let a listener see exactly how much the performance had been costing them.