Beatles erotica really draws the eye. “There’s someone else eating her out,” Matty Healy observes, quietly agape. He’s peeking at a surreal threesome sketched out by John Lennon in 1969, following his marriage to Yoko Ono, that depicts two distinct John Lennons pleasuring their new wife—one above her waist, the other down below. “That’s raunchy, that’s great,” Healy adds, nodding in approval. “It’s always the fucking crazy shit in here, man. I love this place.”
The 1975 frontman is standing inside Peter Harrington, a small, pristine bookstore in central London that caters to obsessives seeking rare editions and artifacts, Shakespeare folios from the 17th century and slightly stained dinner invitations handwritten by Oscar Wilde. Healy is a regular. He started coming here around eight years ago, after the 1975’s debut album kickstarted the quartet’s ascent from scrappy emo-pop boy band to one of the most daring acts of the last decade, leapfrogging genres at broadband speed, with Healy as their polarizing millennial mouthpiece. He has since befriended staffer Ben Houston, who guides us through a private showcase of precious wares in the shop’s fortified inner sanctum. The cool professor to Healy’s overeager student, Houston recalls the first time he saw the singer in the shop and thought, Who the fuck is wearing snakeskin boots? On this Saturday in July, as he takes a break from video and photo shoots surrounding Being Funny in a Foreign Language, the 1975’s fifth album, the 33-year-old arena rocker is more casual, in an untucked button-up, white trousers, and beat-up Adidas sneakers.
The Lennon drawing is part of a limited-edition collection of prints encased in an ivory vinyl bag that’s on sale for £110,000. It naturally draws Healy’s attention, though he later clarifies, in one of his many winding and entertaining monologues, that while he loves the Fab Four, he’s more of a Rolling Stones guy, and that Paul McCartney is “the best Beatle by a fucking mile” and that, coming of age in a nondescript, middle-class town south of Manchester in the 2000s, local legends Joy Division were essentially his Beatles, anyway.
Healy darts around the store’s floor-to-ceiling bookshelves like a dog chasing a sprinkler; at one point, he’s gently chided for rifling through a stack of books that has already been sold. He provides continuous commentary, geeking out over everything from an inscribed copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s 1967 debut, Hell’s Angels, to a volume filled with artful photographs of aging industrial architecture, but he briefly goes silent when presented with a hefty tome known as the Nuremberg Chronicle. It’s one of the first extensively illustrated books ever printed, dating back more than 500 years, with a price tag of nearly £90,000. “This is fucking hectic,” Healy eventually mutters in awe, as Houston gingerly turns the pages to show intricate depictions of religious figures alongside impossibly ornate Latin lettering. Soaking in the historical detail, Healy quips, “People took shit seriously before Twitter.”
He reacts most passionately to ephemera from the 1960s counterculture, early punk zines, or 1970s computer journals with radical intentions for technology; groups of people who bucked orthodoxy in pursuit of utopias outside of mainstream society. “We used to want our artists to be cigarette-smoking bohemian outsiders who were gonna take risks that the rest of us wouldn’t,” he muses. “Now there’s this desire, especially online, for them to be liberal academics.”
Healy’s fixation with the free-minded rebels of Beat culture in particular is entrenched in the 1975’s mythology. He poked fun at his penchant to quote Jack Kerouac’s On the Road “like a twat” on the 2016 single “A Change of Heart,” and his band’s name was taken from an annotated version of the same book dated “1st of June, the 1975.” He no longer possesses that fated copy, though, because he gave it to a girl he was trying to impress during a three-month stint in music school around 2007. “I’d met her once,” he says, “so I don’t even know who the fuck she is.”
On a top shelf, he eyes a few books by William S. Burroughs, who famously romanticized the life of a heroin addict in his autobiographical 1953 novel Junkie. “This stuff has got me into trouble,” Healy says, alluding to his own heroin addiction, which began in 2014 and lasted until he checked into a rehab clinic in Barbados three years later. In his youth, reading writers like Burroughs made him think, What if I’m as decadent as that? “Then,” he deadpans, “I just became a smackhead and I was boring.”
Healy buys one item, a poetry magazine from 1967 with a collaged cover that includes photos of Burroughs and fellow Beat icon Allen Ginsberg, along with irregular typewriter formatting inside that he finds aesthetically pleasing. It runs him £275. “I don’t really do anything with them, I just have them at home and look at them,” he says with a laugh, talking about his stash of hard-to-find relics, which includes guerrilla activist Abbie Hoffman’s guide to free-living, entitled Fuck the System. “There is a real irony,” he acknowledges when asked about the incongruity of paying hundreds for literature that sought to spread radical, anti-consumerist thought. “But you know how I feel about irony and paradox and the conversation—I love it all.”
In almost every conceivable way, Matty Healy is a lot. When he really gets going, he waves his arms in front of his body like a Muppet in distress. Other times, he taps the table in front of him or claps his hands together for emphasis. His laugh is a stoned rattle that curves upward in pitch, somewhere between Seth Rogen and Woody Woodpecker. He speaks in freewheeling paragraphs that often eject full-force from his face. Based on a rough tally, he drops variations of the word “fuck” about 200 times total in a single afternoon, usually to turn the volume up on something he adores or abhors, as in “fuck yeah” he’s a Kate Bush fan, or, conversely, “I fucking hate Metallica. My worst band of all time.”
It can sometimes feel like he’s having a fraught conversation with himself as he doubles back on knotty ideas, momentarily loses his train of thought, or changes his mind entirely mid-sentence. He is cursed with a self-awareness that can turn a simple idea into a galaxy-brain diatribe. “It’s exhausting to be me,” he admits, smiling. “I’m an exhausting person to be around.” The son of British TV stars Denise Welch and Tim Healy, he grew up in the world of celebrity and had a front-row seat to its artifice. “Not that my parents posture,” he says, “but by the time it came to being a performer and doing interviews, in my brain I was like, I will go insane if I have to do any of the posturing I’ve been witness to my whole life.”
This candidness extends to his songwriting. Healy is a hopeless oversharer who sings about love, sex, loss, and the ridiculousness of fame. He’s got a knack for pithy lyrics that sum up the cursed millennial condition: “Modernity has failed us” or “My generation wanna fuck Barack Obama.” On Being Funny, due this fall, he openly wonders, “Am I ironically woke? The butt of my joke?” and it might feel like he’s in grave danger of disappearing up his own ass. But he’s also his own harshest critic. Listening to a 1975 song can feel like being stuck between two Matty Healys, with one of them rolling their eyes at the other. Describing this internal push and pull to me, he says, “I know that I’m not as smart as I think I am.”
Along with being a galvanizing pop artist on record, Healy has also stood up for women’s reproductive rights onstage in Alabama, railed against misogyny in music on live television at the BRITs, and invited climate activist Greta Thunberg to make a four-and-a-half-minute speech on a song. “For me he’s the perfect frontman,” says bestselling memoirist and Japanese Breakfast leader Michelle Zauner, a longtime 1975 fan who sings backup vocals on the group’s recent single, “Part of the Band.” “I often think about how outspoken he’s been about various political issues in this way that I feel like we should expect from punk and hardcore frontmen who are very quiet about those things.”
But Healy’s devil-may-care attitude has also gotten him in hot water—several times. For instance, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Healy tweeted, “If you truly believe that ‘ALL LIVES MATTER’ you need to stop facilitating the end of black ones” alongside a link to the 1975’s “Love It If We Made It,” released two years earlier, which includes the lines, “Selling melanin and then suffocate the Black men/Start with misdemeanors, and we’ll make a business out of them.” He was subsequently accused of using the Black Lives Matter movement to promote his own music. The word “canceled” was bandied. Then, the apology. “Sorry I did not link my song in that tweet to make it about me it’s just that the song is literally about this disgusting situation and speaks more eloquently than I can on Twitter,” he posted before deactivating his account, which had around a million followers. While he still posts on Instagram, he hasn’t been seen on Twitter since. “I didn’t run away from Twitter,” he says now. “I was just like, ‘You know what? If I want to write about the culture war, I don’t wanna be a pawn in it anymore.’”
Healy’s social media comings and goings matter because he happens to be pop’s most incisive songwriter on the topic of online culture, with the ability to conjure revelations by gazing deeply into—or smashing clear through—the internet’s infinite mirror. With “Love It If We Made It,” the pinnacle of the 1975’s web-addled 2018 album A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, Healy took the anxiety of doomscrolling and turned it into a frightfully relevant political anthem. The song plays like a laundry list of society’s maladies and injustices, and offers no easy answers. It still stands as an intimidating monument in the 1975’s catalog, so good that Brian Eno once said he wished he’d written it.
“Part of the Band,” the first single from Being Funny, is another mouthful that only Healy could have come up with, a jokey and sad self-skewering that includes references to the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, masturbation, and “vaccinista tote bag chic baristas.” After he heard it, Coldplay’s Chris Martin texted Healy to tell him that it’s a “brave song.” “And I was like, ‘I don’t know how to be brave,’” Healy says with a laugh.
Some of the track’s most tongue-twisting lines go, “So many cringes in the heroin binges/I was coming off the hinges/Living on the fringes of my imagination.” When Michelle Zauner read those lyrics for the first time, she remembers thinking “how incredible it was that someone could sing ‘cringes,’ ‘binges,’ and ‘fringes,’ and make that rhyme scheme not sound cheesy as fuck.” She giggles. “He toes that line so well, where he’s able to make something compelling and profound and smart that’s also so on the verge of making people hate him.” (Returning the compliment, Healy says Zauner’s lyric “I can’t get you off my mind, I can’t get you off in general,” from the Japanese Breakfast song “Boyish,” is his favorite line of the last 10 years.)
Talking about his songwriting on Being Funny in relation to his dwindling online presence, Healy says, “I’ve thought about every single word on this album for two years; I’d think about a tweet for 20 seconds. My album’s gonna go out to, what, 10 million people, but a tweet could go out to a billion. The maths doesn’t work out. I’ll die on the hill of my records, but I won’t die on the hill of my tweets. It’s better to say good things less than to say average things more.”
With Being Funny in a Foreign Language, Healy and his bandmates—guitarist Adam Hann, bassist Ross MacDonald, and drummer-producer George Daniel—are chasing after the essence of what makes them a world-beating band. This takes hard work. The album’s working title, At Their Very Best, was not necessarily meant as a statement of artistic quality so much as a nod to the fact that these longtime friends are in prime fighting shape.
Healy is on a clean diet, boxing, and training with an oxygen deprivation mask (he calls it his “Bane mask”) so he can run around and sing for two straight hours on stages around the globe over the next couple of years. Daniel and MacDonald are very ripped right now. And Hann has bulked up emotionally, becoming the first 1975 member to get married and have a child. One version of the album’s artwork had the quartet surrounding the baby, though it was deemed too personal. Instead, the cover shows Healy posing atop a burned-out car.
The 1975 at their very best also means that Healy hasn’t done heroin in four years. He says staying off it is “kind of easy for me, because it’s so scary, gross, dirty, and no one fucks with it—you don’t go for a pizza and someone puts heroin in front of you.” He still smokes weed constantly, but he’s working on kicking that too. “Everyone smokes weed, it’s fine. But I’m an addict, so it’s not fine. I don’t wanna be addicted to anything anymore.” On the day we meet, he puffs on a string of relatively mild hash joints. It’s part of an effort to wean himself away from stronger strains as he prepares for an upcoming festival gig in Japan, where drug laws are strict and good weed is hard to find. “The last person I got weed off in Japan was Dave Mustaine from Megadeth, and I don’t think he’s gonna be there,” Healy deadpans. “And my plug in Japan died during COVID. Rest in peace to, um, he was just in my phone as ‘Fat Japan Dealer,’ but he was a good guy.”
Hunched over a steak at a classy French brasserie that’s all high ceilings, glass, and creamy shades of beige, Healy maps out his thought process around Being Funny. “Every record I’ve made, I convinced myself that I had so much to prove, so it had to be about everything that ever happened, everything that’s happening now, and everything that could ever happen,” he says between mouthfuls of meat, which he eats with the zeal of a man who’s been starved for days. “But on this record, I said, ‘Instead of a magnum opus, what about more like a polaroid?’” At 11 songs and 44 minutes, Being Funny is their shortest album yet, about half as long as 2020’s rangy free-for-all, Notes on a Conditional Form.
The 1975 gave themselves some ground rules: avoid twiddling with computers and concentrate on what can be done in the studio live. “Anyone can make something with technology, but we’ve been a band for 20 years—it isn’t algorithmic,” Healy says. “George is one of the best drummers in the world, play the fucking drums! Hann fucking rips on the guitar, so rip on the guitar!” Even with these guideposts in place, Healy admits it took some real restraint to rein things in. “I want my records to represent who I am, and I’m so fucking many things,” he says. “And I also never wanna do anything that feels humble, because that would be performative.”
Being Funny spends a good chunk of its runtime zeroing in on the style that marks a lot of the group’s biggest hits thus far: 1980s pop-rock shiny enough to soundtrack a Breakfast Club reboot, replete with wailing saxes, towering drums, and hooks as sticky as hair gel. Think Peter Gabriel’s So. Think Fine Young Cannibals’ “She Drives Me Crazy.” Think Rick freaking Astley. Think, well, the 1975: Several tracks sound like wiser and more naturalistic versions of the guitar-scratching funk found on their second album, I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it.
New single “Happiness” boasts a few extra layers of 1975-ness that Healy fave Charlie Kaufman could appreciate. The song is based on a demo by the cult dance-pop producer DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ, who embedded a slowed-down sample of an old Healy interview into the track. Talking about that sample of himself, mid-chew, Healy says, “I didn’t know that was me until we fucking cut the record! I just thought it was a guy who’s got a weird English accent.” In this meta-archivist spirit, he adds that he’s currently talking to companies like Netflix to release a 1975 documentary that includes footage of the band going back more than 15 years, and that he wants an obsessive who’s grown up listening to the 1975 to put it all together.
The album is made up of more than just glittering good vibes. “About You,” a duet with Hann’s wife Carly Holt, is a moody highlight where Healy channels Morrissey’s elegant woe over a swelling instrumental that recalls U2’s “With or Without You.” “Human Too,” an R&B bloodletting in which Healy lays his frailties bare, features one of his most affecting vocal performances to date. On opener “The 1975,” the singer takes himself to task for “making an aesthetic out of not doing well and mining all the bits of you you think you can sell” atop dueling pianos that heavily recall LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends.” He pulls out his phone and sings a lyric that was ultimately cut from the track because it was too self-referential, even for him: “You owe James Murphy 20 percent of this song, your career, and the whole idea/Of living in the city with a tingle of fear.”
Then there’s “All I Need to Hear.” Recorded in one take, the heart-tugging piano ballad is the rare 1975 song that wouldn’t require Healy to sing it in order for it to make sense. It feels universal but not anonymous, classic but alive. When I tell him it seems like the type of standard Adele might sing, he nods vigorously. “The goal is something that sounds like a cover,” he says. “As a joke, George was like, ‘I don't think you fuckin’ wrote that.’ It’s my favorite thing he’s ever said to me.” Another disarmingly direct track is “I’m in Love with You,” where Healy repeats the title phrase 24 times over a galloping groove. That song’s forthcoming video features a cameo from Phoebe Bridgers and is a sequel of sorts to the band’s “Change of Heart” clip, wherein Healey danced and mimed and got rejected while wearing a face of clown makeup. He says the choreography for the new visual is so intense that it felt like he had heat stroke while filming it.
Songs like these exemplify another rule Healy set out for himself on Being Funny: to strive for genuine vulnerability at every turn. “We’ve done very clever and very cool a lot,” he says. “But what about—brace yourself—earnest. If you dethrone sincerity with irony, you get an equal tyrant by the end of the day, and I’m kind of tired of it. Because what makes me feel uncomfortable is saying, like, ‘Do you mind telling me that I’m good, or that you love me, just so I can feel OK?’ That’s the shit I’m scared of, being seen as some fucking lame dude. It’s way harder to be a bit naive and soppy without going not, or lol, or I jack off all the time.”
I point out that there are, in fact, several times on the album where he sings about jacking off. “There’s so much of it!” he agrees, laughing. “There are so many good dick jokes on the record. It’s all about my dick. I’m obsessed with my dick for some reason. I’m trying to figure out what that represents. I think it’s because there’s such potency to the idea of the dick, and so much fragility in modern masculinity, and my masculinity. I’m obsessed with that duality, of just, like, having a dick.”
Yes, Being Funny in a Foreign Language is quite funny. There’s a mom joke, a QAnon joke, a joke about a 10-year-old who is “obsessed with fat ass.” Taylor Swift, who got an early listen to the record, summed it up in three words: “It’s so funny.” Most of Healy’s friends are comics, and their approval of his work is particularly important to him: He played the album for musical comedian Bo Burnham, and was pleased when Burnham laughed at all the right times. Healy jokes he was furious when he heard Burnham’s 2021 song “That Funny Feeling,” which lists out society’s ills on the eve of destruction, a la “Love It If We Made It.” “He needs to stay in his lane a little bit,” he adds with a grin. “When he did that song, I was like, ‘You motherfucker.’”
Though Being Funny, which was recorded this year, generally sounds like a more sophisticated take on the 1975 at their most approachable, it didn’t start out that way. For a few months across 2021, Healy and Daniel had writing sessions with BJ Burton, best known for his innovative production work on modern experimental rock touchstones like Bon Iver’s 22, A Million and Low’s radical last two albums, Double Negative and HEY WHAT. By all accounts, the sessions were difficult.
Over email, Burton explains that Healy and Daniel “work really differently” from him. “They’re always pulling up songs from Spotify, or checking another reference for a chord progression. I wanted to help change that, I guess,” he says. “There were moments, sparks where songs were being bred, but ultimately we made a bunch of early demos.” When he learned that Healy and Daniel also started talking to Jack Antonoff, the most in-demand pop-rock producer on the planet, Burton lost all motivation and bowed out. “It was a huge blow to my confidence when they met with Jack,” he admits. “It still stings, honestly.”
Though Healy admires a daring musical left-turn—he cites 22, A Million, Kanye’s Yeezus, and his favorite band Radiohead’s Kid A as this century’s best ones—he admits that the freeform sessions with Burton were very hard. “If you give me, BJ, and George too much rein, we’ll just hang ourselves in glitch and weirdness,” he says. Still, Healy adds that they made “some amazing shit” with Burton, and hints that he may revisit some of those stranger sounds in the future, perhaps on the next 1975 album or a solo record.
Ultimately, the pairing of Healy and Antonoff makes sense. They’re both endlessly referential music nerds who are known for their voluble, neurotic personalities; both have made music videos in which they are seen talking to therapists. “People may think that it’s ‘uncool’ to work with the biggest producer in the world—I don’t give a fuck,” Healy says, leaning in. “I wanna make a great fucking record.” At this point, Healy counts Antonoff as one of the few close friends he’s made in recent years, a kindred spirit. “Jack doesn’t get enlisted by a lot of the best artists because he’s some go-to guy—Jack’s good,” he explains. Healy also makes it clear that he’s always the one in full creative control—of production, songwriting, performances. “Everything the 1975 does, I write.” He laughs softly. “No one touches the lyrics.”
With big ideas about originality, postmodernism, and the dire state of the world wafting from the record and circling our conversation, I offer up a theory about how Being Funny fits into the 1975’s project at large. If “Love It If We Made It” was a last-ditch plea for hope, the ensuing four years, filled with ever-worsening climate catastrophes, war, and major democracies in decline, all lead to one conclusion: We will not make it. But Being Funny, with all of its comfortably familiar sounds, its relatable expressions of joy and sorrow, seems to say: Let’s try to cling onto what we can in the meantime. Healy nods slowly. “That’s exactly it,” he says. “The fertility that is required for new ideas is the future, and we don’t really have the future, so we don’t have that many new ideas. That’s maybe why our record sounds like it does.”
After lunch, the idea of going for a refreshing dip in a nearby pond is floated, but Healy nixes it. He’s full of steak, for one, and two, he thinks it’s just gross. “I also don’t want to pretend like I go swimming in London because I’ve never been swimming in London in my life,” he says. “You want to go get in a pond in fucking central London, are you mental? It sounds grim.” Instead, we head to St. James’ Park, near Buckingham Palace.
On the way, he points out an apartment where Johnny Depp used to live. From there, the conversation veers toward, what else, cancel culture, a topic Healy finds both boring and unavoidable; on Being Funny, he mentions being canceled twice, sounding exhausted both times. Given Healy’s own experiences, he’s become something of a confidant for musicians who suddenly find themselves in the internet’s crosshairs. He says the young British rocker Sam Fender recently called him crying after posting a photo of himself drinking a pint with Depp and classic rocker Jeff Beck (caption: “Some serious heroes”). “Oh bless him, he rang me all day,” Healy says. “His comments just lit up. People who don’t even know who he is were like, ‘Team Johnny,’ or whatever.”
Thinking back to his speech against Alabama’s abortion ban a few years ago, I ask if he plans to address the issue again now that women’s reproductive rights have been stripped away throughout much of America. “Fuckin’ hell, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” he says with a sigh. He then reaches for his phone with a laugh, and shows me a picture of a blue hat he had made that reads, “MAKE THE 1975 POLITICAL AGAIN.” It’s a preemptive response to the relative lack of bold political statements on Being Funny. Is he planning to peddle the caps on tour? “I’m only not selling it because the MAGA hat as a joke is so hacky,” he says. “But I think it’s so old now that it’s almost funny.”
Walking through the park, he describes himself as “politically homeless,” before clarifying his position later on. “I’m certainly not on the extreme left, but I also think that the word ‘centrist’ has become so ubiquitous that it’s annoying,” he says. “I suppose I’m a traditional progressive who is suspicious of woke-ism as a viable worldview or device to make things better. But I don’t want to be associated with any side because then I can’t make jokes about them. I just wanna make jokes.”
Now that there is an expectation for Healy to be a progressive firebrand, he’s chafing against it. Would he be hesitant to speak out on the issues of the day onstage at this point? “Maybe,” he says with another sigh. “I don’t know, man. Like, did it help? If I was still doing that, I feel like I’d just be hammering on the door still. At the moment I’m not letting myself be furious. But there’s probably gonna be another time when I am.”
We eventually stroll over some dry, crunchy grass and settle down into a couple of striped deck chairs underneath a canopy of plane trees. An attendant in an orange vest comes over and meekly informs us that there’s a small fee to use the chairs. Healy politely uses his phone to pay, but once the guy is out of earshot, he voices his irritation. “Renting chairs, renting chairs,” he says, leaning into the second one with dramatic flair. “Why did I not protest that? This is how it happens, bro, first they took the chairs, and we said nothing, then they took the park…” He laughs. “Grass tax.”
Being Funny may not contain many grand topical pronouncements, but it does include some of the most personal songwriting of Healy’s career. “Love is the narrative and the intention and the obstacle,” he says. He mimes the album’s narrative curve while offering commentary: His hand moves up toward the sky (“Is love possible?”), then reaches a peak (“It fucking feels like it…”), then slides back down (a deflated whimper).
Even on the album’s most blissfully loved-up tracks, there’s still usually a line about how it’s only a matter of time before he ruins everything. “I’m projecting something there,” he admits. “I’m conditioned to know that I’m gonna fuck something up, so I go into anything that makes me feel truly vulnerable with an acknowledgment that it may be temporary, or I may be limited in my ability to fulfill this really big thing that doesn’t require me to be sharp or witty or dexterous. It requires me to be fucking naive and simple and nice and reliable. I worry about it, because I’m better at: make a joke and leave.”
Healy’s favorite song on the album at this moment is the finale, “When We Are Together,” a folky weeper that chronicles a relationship’s hollow aftermath. “The only time I feel I might get better/Is when we are together,” Healy sings on the chorus, backed by lonely fingerpicked guitar. It’s beautiful and bleak. He recorded the song at Electric Lady in downtown New York in May, right before he had to turn the album in. He remembers his body going slack after he sang the last line in the studio. “Once I’d finished it, I wasn’t sitting to listen to it,” he says. “I was like, ‘I’m going home. I’ll see you in two weeks.’ It was fucking tough.”
Though Healy declines to talk about the specifics of his love life, in June, reports surfaced that he and art-pop star FKA twigs had broken up after dating for two years. And there’s a lyric from “When We Are Together”—“‘I’m better at writing’ was just a way to get you biting/Oh the truth is that our egos are absurd”—that certainly seems like it could be about another songwriter. “I don’t wanna be obtuse, but that’s not specifically about her,” he says. “This record in particular spans a lot of relationships. And if you’re in a relationship with a creative person, there is always a dynamic there. That line is about me having a monopoly on writing.”
It’s also certainly not the first time Healy has written about his exes in songs. “I’ve had phone calls when albums have come out being like, ‘You’re a fucking piece of shit.’” But he doesn’t anticipate that kind of blowback with Being Funny. “I hate the dudes who are, like, ‘I’m gonna be an asshole in the pursuit of a good line,’” he adds. “I’m not somebody who constructs drama in order to get songs. That’s fucking lame.”
The wind picks up, and Healy relaxes in his chair. “It’s so nice, actually, being outside,” he says. As he delves into more emotional intricacies, his chatter slows and his tone gets a little softer. There’s another potentially loaded line from the song that I’m curious about: “I thought we were fighting, but it seems I was ‘gaslighting’ you/I didn’t know that it had its own word.” It’s the kind of line that could come attached with one of Healy’s patented eye-rolls, a critique of the woke lexicon. That’s not the case here.
“There’s lots of neologisms that I don’t think are needed, but once somebody explained gaslighting, I realized that I’d done that in my relationships and thought, Fuck,” he explains. “Because I’m in therapy a lot, this is one of my new things: watch out for gaslighting. I didn’t know that was a thing. Now I have a way of being aware of when I’m manipulative. Sometimes I’ll do it and I’ll go, ‘Hold on, I’m doing the thing and I know what that is and I’m sorry.’ It’s growing up.”
He stands up from his rented chair and turns around—he’s had his back to the park’s lake the entire time we’ve been here. In front of him is a canvas worthy of Monet, framed by branches and dotted with ducks and lilies. “I never come here,” Healy says. “It looks so romantic.” For a fleeting moment, he appreciates the view in silence.
Stylist: Patricia Villirillo. Stylist assistants: Nelima Odhiambo, Alice Secchi, Hayoung (Heidy) Seo. Prop stylist: Christina Cushing. Photo assistants: Brian Whar, Malachi Breeze, Tey Adeyeye. Makeup: Elaine Lynskey. Hair: Matt Mullhall. Director of Video Programming and Development: Arjun Srivatsa. Photo director and creative producer: Jennifer Aborn. Art director: Marina Kozak. Designer: Callum Abbott. All clothing from band’s personal archive. Photographed and filmed at Haya Studios in London, England.
