Matty Healy is overwhelmed by the view. The 29-year-old Mancunian falls silent as he looks across Manhattan’s bottom end from the 40th floor of One World Trade Center. It’s the only time during our conversation that words fail him.
He’s here to talk about A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, the adventurous third album from his shapeshifting pop group, the 1975. Discussing his songwriting, words like “deconstructed,” “anthological,” and “postmodern” come up a lot, and the record reflects his uncontainable philosophy of the world. It includes era-defining rock anthems and the tenderest of ballads; a jazz standard about keeping things casual and a glittery pop song about Healy’s decision to kick heroin. For good measure, there’s also a creepily funny monologue narrated by Siri.
While the 1975 are already planning a follow-up album, titled Notes on a Conditional Form, for next year—a decision Healy says was informed by au courant binge culture—he isn’t taking anything about the 15 songs on A Brief Inquiry for granted. For now, the chronic overthinker at the forefront of one of the decade’s most relentless bands seems content, adding a new dimension of wisdom to his trademark no-filter openness. “I’m not scared of anything,” he says warmly. “And I’m not hiding anything.”
1. “The 1975”
Matty Healy: Throughout the making of the record, I had a different intro that was based on Steve Reich, like xylophones and strings. I was working on it for fucking ages and I just couldn’t get it right. So, two days before we had to deliver the record, we didn’t have an intro. I was like, “Why don’t I go in the booth on the piano, and then maybe we manipulate it and see if anything interesting happens.” That was the most last-minute thing on the whole record, and it was a real panic. But as soon as we got this version, I was like, “That’s actually fucking dope.” I went from hating myself to being kind of proud of myself in a day.
I love drama and subtext and all that shit, so I think I’d keep those themes. It’s always a signpost of where we are. Instead of taking a picture of someone, it’s like holding a video on them for five minutes—they have to squirm a little bit.
2. “Give Yourself a Try”
It’s about how, whether it’s through pop culture or literature, you’re presented with the idea of these destinations of happiness, of being a grown-up and feeling OK about yourself—and it never really happens. I’d love to talk to myself at 40 and see what I’ve achieved and what I feel… but I will just be the same neurotic person who’s striving to be a grown-up.
Definitely. I have a brother who’s 13 years younger than me. Back when I was in high school, if there was a fight, there’d be the buildup, then the fight, and then the aftermath where people talk shit, but then people would go back to their houses and that was it. But my brother was telling me that now, with Twitter, the fight is the start of it. Once everyone goes home, everyone’s adrenaline is up, so everyone’s like [mimics excitedly typing on a phone]. Then another 15 fights get organized for after school and then that shit kicks off and then you go home, and everyone’s up till like four in the morning, going, “Bro, you’re going to get fucked up!” And then everyone’s super tired and turns up to school all craggy. Nobody can concentrate, everyone’s fighting.
3. “TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME”
That’s the exact word, counterintuitive. Where I’m at now—in the least pretentious way I can try to explain it—I just want to celebrate what I am. And that allows me to be as serious or as frivolous or as emo or whatever it may be. I get to play with all these bits of my identity that I’ve created over the years. So that’s why, when I was making this song, I didn’t have the kind of “serious artist” syndrome that I’ve had before. Making a record is like delineating a personality, and you can’t do that without it being incredibly dynamic. Because that’s what a personality is—loads of things.
As long as songs are about something, it doesn’t matter. When songs are just rhymes, and they don’t mean anything, I’m not into that. But songs can be about frivolity itself—if it’s a good song about frivolity. So it did start out to be a bit counterintuitive, but then I just thought, “I love pop music! I don’t make any apologies for that. And it doesn’t negate my intellect or integrity.” Also, the song just wouldn’t work if I was trying to be verbose. It wouldn’t resonate. It also wouldn’t be fun, because that’s gotta be what music’s about at some point.
4. “How to Draw/Petrichor”
Growing up in the UK, if the radio was on past 7 o’clock, it was dance music. It’s the soundtrack to nighttime, to being up too late, to being a kid. So it’s not so much us trying to pay homage to the records we were into as teenagers as much as it was the sound of being young to me. That’s why “How to Draw” is really easy for us, because that’s our identity. That’s where we come from.
There’s an element of a preview in the production, because it’s such a masterpiece by [drummer/producer George Daniel]. At the moment, if we just put out what we have, it would be very left-field. But it’s taking shape. It just didn’t make sense to tour for two years and make one album, being the band I want to be. It’s not how it’s happening now. It’s not how even I consume things: I watch something on Netflix and it’s like, “That was the greatest thing I've ever seen. Next?”
5. “Love It If We Made It”
Full-on. That definitely started out as us just killing Hats every night before we went onstage, listening to that record until it broke. It’s slightly different; it’s like Blue Nile on steroids. We wanted it to sound really machine-like, in an industrial sense.
Basically, every day post-I Like It When You Sleep, I got [Dirty Hit Records product manager] Ed [Blow] to pick up the tabloid newspapers on the way into the office so I could eventually, after a year, have every single tabloid headline and write a song about that. The sad thing is that, using the actual things that were written, it was just becoming too slapstick and funny.
There was one funny one about a horse: “Horse Burger Butchered by the British,” or something like that. And it was all about foreign nurses as well. So I just let it sit. But then, every time something really touched me, I would make a thing out of it. And then I had loads of stuff, and I had to make it all rhyme. That was the most difficult bit.
There was one moment while making the record that, if you could bottle it, it would be better than any other drug. I was sat in my car, and I had to get this line. I had, “Consultation, degradation, fossil-fueling masturbation/Immigration, liberal kitsch, kneeling on a pitch...” And then I had “excited to be indicted.” I had all these things, but I didn’t have that one bit in between. I needed seven syllables. And I’d just written the Kanye line, and I was thinking, “What else has he famously said?” Then it was like [sings triumphant melody] the syllable spaces of “I moved on her like a bitch” just went in, game show-style, and I was like, “Oh my god! I’ve got it!” And then [my bandmates] were like, “It’s another swear word.” And I was like, “Oh yeah, that’s a bit annoying.” But then I was like, “No, if we’re going to get censored, we’re going to get censored for verbatim quoting the leader of the free world.” That is the song in its essence. How weird is reality?
6. “Be My Mistake”
“Be My Mistake” is just about guilt. It’s about when you are a young person and you struggle sometimes to figure out what you really want. And sometimes, like a lot of things, it requires you to make a mistake before you actually understand what you have. And then maybe you push people away, and then you realize that the idea of a casual relationship with somebody is just not really something that you want.
I love Nick Drake and shit like that, but I’m not into your modern singer-songwriter dude. So I always stylistically stay away from it, but then I realized that’s where a lot of the truth is, if you do it right. I want people to feel personally addressed. If you’re going to tell the truth like that, you can’t dress it up.
7. “Sincerity Is Scary”
It’s about me trying to denounce all of my postmodernism of being sarcastic instead of sincere. It’s me having a go at myself. And it’s wholesome! It’s good for you! It’s good food! It’s just nice to hear a pop star—or a rock star, or whatever I am—worrying about whether he’s meeting his potential of being nice. I like that.
So intense. You’d get him in the room and you’d be so scared. He did the trumpets on D’Angelo’s Voodoo, which is the most iconic brass section for us ever. He was the greatest musician I’ve ever been in a room with, by a mile. It’s the first time that somebody who’s actively brought something to the 1975 sonically has passed. Something died in the music, and it made me really sad.
8. “I Like America & America Likes Me”
If everybody did what I did for a job, there would be less of a divide. That sounds like a really fucking massive statement to make, but what I’m saying is: If you do the same thing in different places all the time, it’s exactly the fucking same thing. Every night looks, smells, sounds, reacts, and operates exactly the same way. Yeah, I notice the way that people have darker hair in Mexico than they have in Scandinavia. Of course. But the things that you notice are the similarities. Personality-wise, there’s differences, but we’re all worried about the same shit. Everyone’s just scared of dying!
Not only does it tune your voice, it stops it, compresses it, punctuates it. It turns it into an instrument. But also, this song started out as an homage to SoundCloud rap. It’s the sound of America to me at the moment. I was almost going to put it out with just mumble lyrics, to see how far I could take it.
9. “The Man Who Married a Robot/Love Theme”
Probably more than I’d like to. It’s just pointing out how fucking weird things are by that removal of the human experience—just hearing a robot saying “cooked animals” on this track is a bad vibe, right? Why is it a bad vibe? This is the question I’m asking. It’s the acknowledgement of an already existing dystopian reality. It sounds like a warning of what a future could be, but you realize it’s exactly what we’re living in.
It was going to be my dad reading it and then it was going to be me doing spoken word. But I was like, “Fuck that, sounds lame.” And then we were like, “Who should it be?” We just knew immediately. Because earlier this year, post-rehab, I was obsessed with the 2020s, like the idea that this next decade is going to be some retro-future kind of idea. I had, like, purple hair and an orange coat and I was like, “Everything’s going to be fucking super future!” I was just on that kick. I was like, “Robots, robots, robots.”
I am really just asking questions. What’s weird to me is the stuff that we just get used to. When I first heard that robot voice on OK Computer, it was like, eugh! [jumps back] That’s fucking scary! The idea of a synthesized voice is scary. But now, you could have this track on in the background and not even fucking realize! People put these voices in their kitchen and they’re like, “GET ME EGGS,” and the robot’s like, “OK.”
It’s also difficult because, as a songwriter, it just poses questions. Katy Perry will do a song where she’ll say “epic fail” or something like that, but Leonard Cohen’s new record isn’t going to come out and reference FaceTime, right? But in order to be really, really true about the human experience, he would kind of have to, if he was talking about a relationship: “Oh my love, far away, in a distant land… I could get in touch with you in a second!” The internet has completely changed every perspective of how we relate to one another.
10. “Inside Your Mind”
“Inside Your Mind” is just the idea of sometimes wanting to know what your partner is thinking so much that you want to smash their head open to look. I liked that as a metaphor. I like the idea of morbidly romantic stuff sometimes. I explained it to my girlfriend, and she found it quite sexy.
11. “It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You)”
I think I'm trying to consciously hide it behind being somebody else, writing about their struggle and their strife. Like, “So I’ve got this friend, right? And he’s got this really weird rash on his gooch?” [laughs] That kind of vibe. So it’s like, “Well tell your friend that he should...” But it’s quite obvious it’s about me, because there’s been a real reluctance for me to talk about it. I didn’t want to talk about being a heroin addict for five years—having actual nightmares of the idea of it being uncovered. So there was a humorous reluctance to disclose it in this song.
I wouldn’t have written about heroin unless I had gotten clean. “I do it” was never a good enough reason for me to talk about it. I don’t think Kurt Cobain tried to romanticize drug addiction; because he was so publicly the coolest person in the world, and grunge was so dark, he was telling his truth. Whereas Pete Doherty was a different character. That was the thing that I was always scared of—being an obnoxious celebration of that kind of sickness. I just felt so lucky. I hadn’t lost anything really. And that’s normally why people go to rehab, because they lost so much they can’t bear to lose anything else. But I was lucky.
12. “Surrounded by Heads and Bodies”
Yeah, it was only me and this other person—me in my own compound, and she had her own compound across the way. We rarely saw each other apart from some shared therapy, and she was such a beautiful, lovely woman. I felt a real connection and an empathy with her. And we soon found out that we lived on the same road in Manchester! And we were in Barbados. It was crazy man. One road in the whole world.
I was reading that when I was in rehab. There was no one there. It was me and my nurses, who’d come in and check on me, and then Angela, miles away. I was surrounded by no one, and the book was just open on the front page, as most copies of Infinite Jest are.
That was kind of the joke. Because nobody reads it all the way! Everyone our age has got a battered, quarter-read copy of Infinite Jest.
13. “Mine”
Me neither. It came from our love of Coltrane. I always use the magpie analogy: A magpie will collect a diamond or a piece of glass or a piece of foil—it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s shiny and attractive. It’s the same thing with us—as long as it’s beautiful. And I wanted a standard, because imagine writing a new Gershwin song, imagine a new one of those existing. That hasn’t happened since—it’s difficult to say. Was it Mariah Carey’s Christmas song? That’s probably the last one. “Hey There Delilah?” That was big. [laughs]
14. “I Couldn’t Be More in Love”
It’s because I struggle to sing like that. Some people can just sing and it’s the most natural thing in the world to them. But in order for me to get people to believe me, I have to really, really try. Those vocals were actually from the day before I went to rehab. To be fair, I sang it better when I got out, but there was just something in those vocals. It was kind of guttural. I was really upset and scared. I feel like there’s a hopelessness in the vocal performance.
Yeah it’s weird, isn’t it? It has some Eric Clapton moments.
That’s my solo, as well. Again, I don’t want to celebrate the part when I was using, but there were some moments we captured where I was on the brink, and there’s a real intensity to it. That was one take. It was the demo, and I just fucking nailed it for some reason. Like anything, it’s a series of little perfect accidents.
Oh, I’ll rip it to fuck.
15. “I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)”
It really makes sense, right? “I always want to die sometimes…” I don’t know why I didn’t write that earlier.
Well, it did. But then, in the production, I was actually quite clever, because it sits in the middle. It’s not a “Bittersweet Symphony” or an Oasis song really, because it’s not as dark. But lyrically, vocally, it’s so Manchester. But then I got David [Campbell], who did the strings for “Iris” by Goo Goo Dolls, to do the strings for it. I was thinking, “I have the potential for this to be cinematic. Why not do a gritty, English ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’?” It just made a lot of sense. As I was putting the strings on it, I was like, “Is this our big song?”
