The 1975 - TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME

The 1975 are nothing if not unpredictable. On ‘Give Yourself A Try’, the first preview of new album ‘A Brief Enquiry Into Online Relationships’, Matty Healy bluntly laid out his recent struggles with addiction, and recounted the suicide of a young fan. On its follow-up ‘Love It If We Made It’, he viciously proclaimed “modernity has failed us!” while also incorporating Donald Trump tweets into impassioned verses about the dark cloud we currently exist under. Third track ‘TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME’, meanwhile, finds him singing about… well, absolute bobbins to be honest.

From the moment the track twists into life with an amiable tropical beat and Drake-like flourishes - not to mention the forceful autotune that threatens to drown Matty’s vocals (he’s presented three starkly different tones across the three tracks so far) - it’s clear that this is something we’ve never heard from The 1975 before, and it takes a while to digest.

Well, it looks to be that way until the catchiest chorus we’ve heard this year worms its way in, set over stabs of chart-ready piano, and lodges itself in your brain indefinitely. Sure, the lyrics are deliberately vacuous - Matty racks his brain to try and remember if he called a certain girl once, twice or thrice, realising that he’s been, well, doubling up, before turning it back on his partner (“you text that boy sometimes,” he quips) - but in amongst the heaviness that defined ‘Love It If We Made It and will surely define ‘A Brief Enquiry Into Online Relationships’ at large, The 1975 understand the power of letting all that go for three-and-a-half minutes via a pop song - and on the face of it, a very silly pop song - that makes you feel on top of the fucking world.