Who Is Matty Healy?

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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

Healy is something of a test case for the digital panopticon and its reaction cycles. Though he has always run his mouth, he long seemed dedicated to saying the right thing, eventually, and getting praised for it. He sometimes ceded his spotlight to the voices of women. The band’s last album, “Notes on a Conditional Form,” from 2020, opens with a monologue about the climate crisis delivered by Greta Thunberg. 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. 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. 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.

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. He stayed on Instagram, where he constantly made fun of both himself and the fans who seemed obsessed with his morality. He likened his music to a YouTube video titled “Sound Effect—Grown Man Crying Like a Little Baby.” When a fan messaged him to ask why he followed the Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse and the self-declared misogynist Andrew Tate on the platform, he posted the message, along with a reply: “We are starting a band.” On tour, he began kissing fans onstage, and these moments kept going viral—he sucked a girl’s thumb, he kissed a boy, he kissed Ross MacDonald, the band’s bassist. In the middle of one show, he lay back on a couch onstage as a tattoo artist inked the words “iM a MaN” on his torso. He inspired articles about the resurgence of the sleazeball and the appeal of the sensitive dirtbag. He sang like a louche Elvis and played a lipstick-red guitar.

“If you do a show that’s about the duality of your life, is it still Method acting?” he asked between songs at the O2. The house lights came on, and white-coated technicians touched up the band members’ clothes and faces. A tech slammed a clapboard, and they resumed their positions, concluding the meta intrusion.

The band resumed playing against the house-in-the-suburbs backdrop; the crowd sang along blissfully to a bouncy song about a school shooting. At the halfway point, there was a theatrical interlude, in which Healy, alone on the stage, played the role of one of the confused young men he’d been singing about. He unbuttoned his shirt and mimed masturbation; he desperately embraced a stage tech. While TVs blared footage of Tory politicians, he pretended to make out with himself, hands travelling up and down his back. I’d seen the same show at Madison Square Garden a few months before, and I’d cringed at this part, initially. Then Healy knelt in front of a raw steak, took an enormous bite, did a couple of dozen pushups, and squeezed his entire body through a small screenless television. His willingness to be embarrassing and abrasive edged into a kind of generosity, and a vulnerability. This is the heart of his appeal.

A few minutes later, the crowd went nuclear, but not for him: Taylor Swift, in a mirrored minidress, had walked onstage, performing “Anti-Hero,” from her most recent album. “Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism / Like some kind of congressman,” she sang. Swift has been a fan of the band since at least 2014, when she was photographed wearing a 1975 T-shirt. Rumors circulated, at the time, that she and Healy were dating. (Healy, hounded for months to comment, said that having “Taylor Swift’s boyfriend” as one’s public identity would be an “emasculating thing.”) “Anti-Hero” is self-deprecating and self-consciously Zeitgeist-y, with convoluted lyrics wrapped so tightly around the melody that they somehow seem tossed off—in other words, it’s a little like a song by the 1975. She then performed “The City,” a song from the band’s first album. Girls around me were sobbing, as if they’d just gone blind looking at a solar eclipse.