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. “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. And yet “I don’t feel lonely in this,” Healy adds. “That can be one of the things I really struggle with. But I feel like we’re all in this together. Humanity is quite engaged at the moment.”
It’s as if all the disquietude that’s bedeviled him and fueled his creativity has found its match in this current moment. 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. Healy, 31, is a clever pop mind, and the 1975’s music feels like a scavenger hunt through his subconscious. That intimacy with his own angst is partly why his just-as-angsty young fans love and obsess over him (his lanky rockstar looks play a role in this too).
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