He was “never the cocaine-y party guy at five in the morning,” he says. Slow-down-and-numb drugs, anything that knocked him out. That intimacy with his own angst is partly why his just-as-angsty young fans love and obsess over him (his lanky rock-star looks play a role in this too). Healy, 31, is a clever pop mind, and the 1975’s music feels like a scavenger hunt through his subconscious. Healy has always tackled big issues (climate change, mental health, politics) through pop music, and his band’s latest, Notes on a Conditional Form, out May 22, is a wildly ambitious exploration of existential anxiety. It’s as if all the disquietude that’s bedeviled him and fueled his creativity has found its match in this current moment. Humanity is quite engaged at the moment.” But I feel like we’re all in this together.
“That can be one of the things I really struggle with.
And yet “I don’t feel lonely in this,” Healy adds. “It is a very, very odd time,” he says over the phone from the recording studio in the English countryside where he’s been quarantining with the drummer-producer George Daniel, his bandmate in the 1975 and principal creative collaborator. As the planet reels in anxiety and grief, Matty Healy sounds surprisingly calm, almost as if he’d expected this, or certainly hadn’t been entirely surprised by it.
