As his band prepare to release their fifth album, he talks courting controversy, cancel culture and getting clean
Matty Healy is sitting in a restaurant on the top floor of a Tokyo hotel – the same restaurant, as he excitedly points out, where Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray’s characters meet in Lost in Translation. It is the night before the 1975’s first live show in two and half years, headlining Japan’s SummerSonic festival, and Healy is talking expansively – Healy always talks expansively – about the 1975’s ability to reflect their era, a skill that has propelled the band to vast sales and something approaching global stardom, and which has caused the 33-year-old to be pegged as a spokesperson for the millennial generation.
He talks about the curious coincidence that saw them release their previous album, Notes on a Conditional Form, its lyrics transfixed on the notion of what Healy called “a global anxiety attack”, precisely as the world went into lockdown. He also says he “tries to think that I’m just doing my own thing, but every time I look back it always really makes sense in that time”.
