A Foreign Language: Making Sense of the Latest the 1975 and Arctic Monkeys Albums

Before I devoted my life to poetry, I use to want to be a rock star. It was my fascination with obscure and dense lyrics via the song-writing of the 1975 and Arctic Monkeys that gave me this inspiration, and I thought I had quirky ideas -- why can't I start a band like them?

Thank goodness I never pursued that fantasy; some failed attempts are better left to poetry, or the secret pages of our journals that should never be published as a song (I'm looking at you, T Swift, and at Midnights). But the overly-clever lyrical aspects of the 1975 and Arctic Monkeys continue to fascinate me, and with the release of their latest albums, I began thinking of their evolutions (or lack thereof) since my 2012 Tumblr years.

Join me, won't you, on some truly unhinged and loosely-glued together thoughts:

The 1975 - Being Funny in a Foreign Language

I wanted to start with what I consider the weaker of the two albums and discuss the negative end of this decidedly "clever" lyrical crafting. Lead-singer Matt Healy has provided some truly great one-liners and instances of word play over the years (see 2016's "Car-crashians" allusion in the song "Love Me"), guided by a tongue-in-cheek wit.

Yet, in 2022, Healy's charm has worn off, and his boyish intellect seems precocious and un-endearing. His constant need to assert he survived being "cancelled" wasn't interesting in 2018, and it's even less interesting considering that he can't be cancelled. Ultimately, he is a white man.

Much of the focus of Being Funny seems to be on the lyricism, as the instrumentation falls incredibly flat. Where 2020's Notes on a Conditional Form brought some great sonic exploration, Being Funny is one-note and recycled. "Looking For Somebody (To Love)" borrows notes of the very closely-named "Somebody Else." Even album high note "Oh Caroline" sounds like the band's singles from 2018's A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships.

If that wasn't enough, it's become a cliché for 1975 albums to now end on a very subdued song since the popularity of 2016's "She Lays Down." We get it, Matt -- you can be genuine, too.

Where past installations in the band's discography sound unique, interesting, and characteristically ambitious, Being Funny is a let-down of the same-old stuff. The album titles and the lyrics have become uninterestingly and pointlessly unclever for no one's sake but the band's.

Where is the inspiration? Certainly not in Jack Antonoff's studio.

Arctic Monkeys - The Car

Meanwhile, British alt-rockers have traded in the sound that made them popular during my high school years for something completely different. Following 2018's very-weird, very-great Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, no one had any clue what direction the band would take their sound next.

Well, 2022 Monkeys don't sound a whole lot different than 2018... The Car is a long-lost relative to the space-rock, hotel-jazz delivery established on Tranquility. However, it is a lot less cohesive.

It's as though Alex Turner and company said "we want to push our fan base far away and to scare them off permanently", and while that didn't work for me, I can see how many might feel that way. The band is no longer interested in funky rock like "Fluorescent Adolescent" with confusing and amazing wordplay. The Car is centered around human emotion, not desert-arena grooves.

Turner gives an unprecedented and outstanding vocal performance that I think is overshadowed by bad mixes. There are few up-tempo highs, mostly centered in spine-tingling acoustic guitar backings and haunting distorted bellows ("Sculptures of Anything Goes"). It is weird, it is British sci-fi, it is sexy. It is, however, unpopular, and I feel too far removed from the band's ethos.

We can have both -- weird alt-rock meshed with clever lyricism about sex and heartbreak without sacrificing too much. All this to say, I really love the album, and have listened over ten times. Oops.

All-in-all, it seems the poet's musician has retired in this day-and-age. Hozier is the last remainder of the true poetic license that marked many a Tumblr dashboard, a final guiding light for socially-inept teens. I hope teenage Dane doesn't feel too lost in this unforgiving hellscape that has taken so much artistic intelligence from some truly fantastic acts.

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What did you think of the above albums? Did we get it right? Let us know in the comments below!

- Ritter