They’ve been a band for 20 years, but ask lead singer Matty Healy about the 1975 — and more specifically where they fit into the current musical landscape — and he’s rather blunt in his assessment.
“The story of the 1975 is happening right now,” says a man who has never been one to shy away from showering his own work with a sense of grandiosity. “The 1975 is always happening,” he continues, dragging from an ever-present joint as he lies in bed one afternoon and speaks via Zoom from his home in the U.K. “It’s not something that’s constructed. It’s just a thing. It’s like perpetual motion.”
The 1975, made up of Healy, drummer George Daniel, guitarist Adam Hann and bassist Ross MacDonald, has never been bigger. The British band will headline Madison Square Garden later this year as part of the world tour behind their new album, “Being Funny in a Foreign Language,” which debuted Oct. 14.
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The group’s songs, all dance grooves, pulsing bass lines and ’80s-tinged synths, have typically reeked of disquietude and served as a maze into Healy’s brilliant but occasionally self-indulgent mind. But one of pop music’s keenest observers is now feeling a bit more, well, grown-up. “All that postmodern nihilism that loads of art was affected by in the late 20th century, early 21st century — addiction, self-obsession, self-deprecation — it’s all maybe very cool and sexy and appropriate,” Healy says. “But eventually it does give way for a less sexy set of circumstances or ideas. Like responsibility? Family? Future?”
Focusing on such topics is a bold and downright surprising turn coming from someone who was (perhaps unfairly) characterized for a long time as a self-important heroin addict with a mouth at constant battle with his undeniable musical talent. Whereas previous albums have seen Healy, who writes the band’s lyrics, battling with big-ticket issues from cultural oversensitivity to climate change, Healy, now 33 and single, has settled on what is perhaps the most challenging and fraught topic of all: love.
“Being Funny,” he says, is less about needling the listener and more about finding out if he’s capable of feeling some of life’s most base emotions. “I’m at a point now where it’s easier for me to say I pissed myself or to do something really unflattering than [to say], ‘Tell me you love me, that’s all I need to hear’ ” — as he does on the chorus of one of the album’s most affecting songs, the appropriately titled ballad “All I Need To Hear.”
Consequently, he’s made the most straightforward and focused album of his band’s career — one centered on love and how to obtain it. He enlisted pop super-producer Jack Antonoff (who has worked with stars including Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey and Lorde) to join him and his longtime songwriting collaborator, drummer-producer Daniel.
Antonoff describes Healy as “this figure of endless love” and says the two bonded almost immediately. “He really just wants everyone to come together,” Antonoff says in a phone interview. For Healy, working with Antonoff was hardly born out of a desire to be relevant — his band doesn’t need help on that front — but simply the desire to make a new friend in his 30s. “You make less and less good friends as you get older,” Healy says, “and I think we were talking producer to producer. It just got to the point where we were talking so much it was like, ‘Why don’t we just actualize this conversation?’ ”
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One topic the pair kept landing on was what defines a band in 2022. At a time when pop has firmly supplanted rock as the most relevant genre of music and solo stars far outweigh bands in popularity, the 1975 is something of an anomaly. Healy chalks up their cohesion to their long history together. “We were a band before we were people,” he says of his group, with whom he’s performed since each of them was roughly 13 years old. They first became famous in 2013 thanks to their eponymous debut LP, which reached No. 1 in the U.K., followed in quick succession by 2016’s U.S. chart-topping “I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It” and 2018’s critically praised “A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships.”
Share this articleShare“Obviously there’s an element of codependency between us,” he continues. “We grew up together. The longest I’ve ever spent away from any of those guys is probably a week.”
Antonoff says the 1975 is the rare capital-B band these days: “You can put a bunch of musicians onstage and say, ‘That’s just a bunch of musicians onstage.’ And then you can put a bunch of musicians onstage and say, ‘That’s a band,’ ” he explains. “The 1975 are a band in every sense of what it means.”
Throughout this long-running relationship with one another, the band has kept things quite small, even amid their ever-growing public stature. Healy says he’s not only the singer and mouthpiece for the 1975, but also art-directed the entirety of the band’s upcoming tour. “I’m not somebody who turns up to a prebuilt stage and signs off on it,” he says. “It’s an exciting proposition but I think it’s just an extension of what we’ve always done, because I’ve always been super hands-on.”
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Operating in such a homegrown fashion, unsurprisingly, has its drawbacks: Healy admits he and his bandmates have almost entirely bankrolled their musical endeavors to this point — and have not always come out on top. Because of covid, the tour behind their last album, 2020’s sprawling 22-track “Notes on a Conditional Form,” had to be scrapped almost entirely. Healy hadn’t taken out insurance for the outing.
“Economics is economics,” he says with a shrug. “The truth is, all of our tours, the way they’ve looked and the height they’ve operated on, have kind of out-scaled the size of the band. It’s always been this model of reinvestment to expand what the 1975 is as opposed to our profit margins.”
Now, as he waits to head out on the road, Healy is just trying to keep his mind occupied. On the days when he is not working, just sitting around and watching YouTube, “those are the times where I feel sick or I get a migraine. If I’m not doing, I’m too much in my brain.”
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While his principal vice used to be heroin, he went to rehab in 2017 after pleas from his bandmates to stop using. Now he says he doesn’t “even want to do it anymore. That’s not really a thing. I’m lucky ’cause of that.” Marijuana remains his only true addiction, yet one he doesn’t think he could ever kick. “Everyone can understand coming off hard drugs is difficult because it’s so chemical-based,” he says. “But to be honest with you, smoking weed for me, the idea of stopping, that’s a behavioral issue that goes back to when I was a kid. That’s the hard one.”
A more productive use of his time remains songwriting: Despite the 1975’s album dropping just this month, Healy is already looking ahead. He’s working on a potential solo project and has even booked studio time in Los Angeles for February. And, of course, he’s already thinking about the next 1975 album: “I’ve got the title; I’ve got some mood boards. Because I just feel it. On this record, we’re very much on Earth and on our next record maybe we’ll be in space.”
Healy says he and his band have never been more on-point. It’s why their global tour is titled “At Their Very Best.”
“It was almost a bit arrogant,” Healy says. “But what we meant is: As people we are fitter, we’re stronger, we’re writing better. We’re being earnest. This is us at high performance.”
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