He stayed on Instagram, where he constantly made fun of both himself and the fans who seemed obsessed with his morality. He deactivated his Twitter account and began the slow heel turn that has brought him to his current persona: a post-woke rock star, switching unpredictably between tenderness and trollishness. In May, 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, he tweeted, “If you truly believe that ‘ ALL LIVES MATTER’ you need to stop facilitating the end of black ones,” and appended a link to the 1975’s most anthemic song, “Love It If We Made It,” which begins, “We’re fucking in a car, shooting heroin / Saying controversial things just for the hell of it / Selling melanin then suffocate the black man / Start with misdemeanors and we’ll make a business out of them.” It was, to Healy, the clearest way to articulate his thoughts about racial injustice and police brutality, but people perceived it as a callous attempt to promote the band. Fans asked him to take a stand on other things-Israel and Palestine, police abolition-but his politics, by his own estimation, are not particularly radical, and he was not the voice for activism that some wanted him to be. When the 1975 won the British equivalent of a Grammy, Healy, in an acceptance speech, read a snippet of an essay by the writer Laura Snapes about misogyny in music. The band’s last album, “Notes on a Conditional Form,” from 2020, opens with a monologue about the climate crisis delivered by Greta Thunberg. He sometimes ceded his spotlight to the voices of women.
Though he has always run his mouth, he long seemed dedicated to saying the right thing, eventually, and getting praised for it. Healy is something of a test case for the digital panopticon and its reaction cycles. The future holds little imagined promise, and, to cope, teens are indulging in reactionary conservatism or the oppression Olympics, the world and their identities distorted by social media. Now, as Healy sees things, the average seventeen-year-old is worried about melting ice caps, or the failures of capitalism, or how easy it is to say the wrong thing.
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He sang the song’s refrain: “I’m sorry if you’re living and you’re seventeen.” When Healy and his three bandmates were that age-they have been a band, and best friends, for twenty years-they were mostly concerned with shows, records, parties, and girls, and they believed earnestly in the power of art to free themselves and change the world. Then he lit a cigarette and began to play the jittery riff that opens the band’s latest album, “Being Funny in a Foreign Language.” “You’re making an aesthetic out of not doing well / And mining all the bits of you you think you can sell,” he sang, taking long pulls from a bottle of red wine as the audience roared. His band, the 1975, stood in position among wood-panelled walls and framed family photos, and Healy-skinny, in a close-cut suit and a tie, black curls slicked back behind his ears-rose and dramatically blinked at the lights, took a swig from a flask, and sat down at a piano. In January, the thirty-four-year-old British rock star Matty Healy woke up on a couch in his house, except it was not his house, it was a stage set at the O2 Arena, in London, and twenty thousand people were there with him, screaming.
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