Matty Healy is the verbal equivalent of a rollercoaster – one second he’s up, the next he’s down, and two seconds after he’s hurtling through time and space to land on yet another observation or theory. And yet just like those hair-raising rollercoasters, he always arrives back, reasonably quickly, at the point he took off from.
The last time we chatted was a few months into the arrival of Covid-19 – May 2020, which he says he remembers (considering he is the primary always-on interviewee for his band, The 1975, we’re seriously not so sure about that). Back then, Healy was giving his opinions on post-pandemic life (“It’s all a bit JG Ballard and Cormac McCarthy, if that doesn’t sound too extreme, but what happens next is all about redesigning some kind of utopia from the rubble”), Seamus Heaney (“a massive influence because he celebrates the everyday in such a deep way”), and a potential future of the music industry (“It’s the people at the top of the industry that want musicians to continue operating with minor sacrifice”).
I’ve been making a point over the past three records – and I really hammer it home on the new album – that you can dethrone sincerity with irony, but you could end up with each being an equal tyrant
Now? More than two years later, with a compact new album called Being Funny in a Foreign Language oozing clear-headed vulnerability and a heretofore cloaked unaffectedness, Healy is somewhat of a changed, perhaps more contrite person.
“What I talk about has been defined by the consumption of content in the internet age, of substances, of love, of relationships. It’s all about the mediation of how we communicate,” Healy says. “I’ve been making a point over the past three records – and I really hammer it home on the new album – that you can dethrone sincerity with irony, but you could end up with each being an equal tyrant.
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“It’s easier to be ironic or sardonic than to be earnest or sincere, to look a bit soft or come across as naive. Online activity promotes the former, but I’m more interested nowadays in challenging ideas that I actually find difficult – big ideas like love, and other things that I’m not going to take the piss out of.”
Such a stance, he admits, is different from how he felt in his early 20s. Now 33-years-old, Healy says that having an irony-laden point of view on most subjects under the sun is all well and good, but ultimately, “basic kinds of emotions and needs aren’t being satisfied by this false sense of community we have created on the internet”.
He ducks and weaves, as we have noted, around topics yet there is a new sense of composure within Healy and The 1975′s new songs that ably corrals them. Their previous album, 2020′s Notes on a Conditional Form, was a sprawling 22-track, 80-minute epic listen; the new album is half that and is all the better for it. The crux of it, he says, is trying the best he can to nail down the transient nature of happiness, hope, humanity.
If money is the main reason you get on stage to do what you love doing, creatively, then it’s not the right decision
“I’m holding a lighter in my hand right now,” he tells me with a typical out-of-the-blue conversational swerve. “David Byrne could, I’m sure, write the best song in the world about this lighter but he’s not going to write at length about love because he doesn’t take on big subjects. Writing about big things is, I reckon, quite hard because you have to give them the reverence they require.
“With every 1975 song previous to now, wherever I have come close to sincerity I have negated it with a line, something distasteful about myself, or simply not allowed myself to be in a truly sincere space. On the new album, I didn’t do that; I challenged myself to be different because I’d done the self-deprecation, of being defined by the tropes of nihilism, individualism, addiction, all of that. What is hard for me to say is ‘tell me you love me – that’s all I need to hear.’”
Something else that Healy said to this newspaper two years ago has relevance now that The 1975 are touring the world as if you-know-what had never happened. They are touring the US in November/December, UK and Ireland in January, Japan next April, and then festival shows throughout the summer.
“The kind of big shows that people have been used to from us are gone,” Healy said in 2020. “I’m not going to go back after this situation [Covid-19] and start loading up the lorries again.” The comment is revisited after recent news that Healy and The 1975 had turned down the immensely lucrative offer of a main support slot on Ed Sheeran’s US tour of open-air shows next summer. Noting due respect to Sheeran, he says the point of refusing such an offer is to avoid being treated as a commodity or commercial entity.
“If money is the main reason you get on stage to do what you love doing, creatively, then it’s not the right decision. Also, doing the tour would have been us doing something that didn’t address the people that have been with us from the beginning.”
[ The 1975’s Matt Healy: ‘Seamus Heaney has always been a massive influence’Opens in new window ]
When Healy speaks about the band’s forthcoming shows, he does so not in terms of bulk, but impact. We dread to utter the word “intimate”, but we do, and he isn’t overly enthusiastic about it. He starts off with “Well…” and, unusually, pauses for breath.
“That word normally gives the impression of a venue being a small theatre, which is not what we’re doing,” Healy says.
“We’ll do that at some point, but the way we have looked at shows for the new album is this: as an experience for the listener, the show design for Notes on a Conditional Form was almost like going to an IMAX cinema to see a Transformers movie – there was so much information in such a long show that sometimes you had to go to the toilet. You felt, perhaps, that you were witness to a construct, whereas the new album is more like being in a theatre: you feel you are witness to a moment or a series of them. Ultimately, it’s a different 1975 show for a different 1975 album.”
We leave it there. Almost. A final question. Whenever we read an interview with Healy, he is invariably described as “a spokesperson for the millennial generation”. It is, he agrees, a grand title. “I don’t really know,” he wavers, “and I don’t think about it that much.”
He is right to have such a healthy disregard for such labels. He mentions that in 2014 and 2015, The 1975 won Worst Band in the World titles (chosen by public vote) at the NME Awards. From that time onwards, he says, he had to condition himself to view public opinion with cynicism.
“My lack of concern for what is said about me informs who I am, and as much as that comes from criticism, it also comes from compliments. The ‘millennial spokesperson’ tag is lovely, and I love making music and I’m glad that people are interested in what I have to say, but what I mostly try to do is point people in the direction of other people I am informed by.”
The 1975′s new album, Being Funny in a Foreign Language, is released through Dirty Hit Records on October 14th. They play the 3Arena, Dublin, on January 29th, and the SSE Arena, Belfast, on January 30th
