Matty Healy is the latest guest on Joshua Citarella’s podcast Doomscroll. The 1975 frontman sat down for two and a half hours of talk about pop culture, the media, the commodification of counterculture, and so on, and so forth. It’s an expansive discussion, one that will probably have some people rolling their eyes, feeling like they’re trapped at a party with a blowhard. But I suspect some will take enjoyment from it. Some of the sections in the clickthrough menu are titled “Hauntology,” “Ice-cream-ification,” and “Slow cancellation of the future.”
In the final segment of the interview, beginning at the 2:21:34 mark, Healy discusses the ideas driving the 1975’s next album — or rather, he mostly talks about what he doesn’t want to address. Alluding to his brief romantic relationship with Taylor Swift, he says he’s not interested in writing about his own “lore” the way some artists do; he’d rather keep using his songs to analyze culture and popularize academic subjects that interest him:
Last year I became a way more well-known public figure for loads of different reasons. The only reason that I was interested in is kind of like what I was doing. So I think that a lot of artists, they become very interested in their lore, or they become interested in the things that have happened outside of their art that people know about, and they want to address that. And fair enough, do you know what I mean?
But maybe on my first record when it was very much like a series of journal entries with little bits of heartbreak and all of these stories about relationships — I used to write about relationships a lot more and stuff like that — maybe I’d be inclined to reflect on my experience as a person, and more as an artist. But I would kind of just be lying if I made a record about, I don’t know, all the stuff that was said about me or my casual romantic liaisons or whatever it may be that I’ve kind of become known for, just because I was famous. I think that that’s an obvious thing to draw from. And I’m just not interested in it. And I think like the maintenance of the status quo is something that I always fight against. So the idea of making a record about something that personally happened to me, that by the time I put it out is gonna be like two years old, I see people doing that as well, and it’s not interesting.
It’s possible to receive those words as an implied critique of Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department, which was hyper-focused on her own lore and which featured many songs widely assumed to be about Healy. Even if he didn’t intend it as shade, it seems fair to assume we won’t be getting Healy’s side of the story on the next 1975 LP.
The full chat between Healy and Citarella is viewable below.