Matty Healy says the new 1975 album is all about “captured moments,” but really, he’s been trying to capture one slippery idea for years: how to be sincere without feeling like a cringe merchant. Enter Being Funny in a Foreign Language, the band’s fifth LP and perhaps their most emotionally honest, least overcooked offering to date—which, if you’ve followed The 1975, is saying something.
“I think we’re stepping into an era of sincerity,” Healy tells me, surprisingly earnest for someone who once named a song Sincerity Is Scary. “And that’s something I’ve been talking about for a while. I used to always throw in a joke or something self-deprecating to cut myself off at the pass. But now, the band is like, ‘Dude, just say it. Just say you’re in love.’”
And he does. On I’m In Love With You, Healy sings the titular line with no smirk, no wink, no caveat. He says he was tempted to “get a knot in there,” some twist to undercut the emotion, but his bandmates intervened. “They were like, ‘You’ve proven you’re the sardonic guy. Let it go.’”
Letting go is a theme across the album. The band opted for concision over maximalism this time—fewer ideas, more feeling. “I’ve made records where it’s like, ‘Here’s everything that’s ever happened, everything that’s happening, and everything that could happen,’” Healy says. “This one’s just, ‘Here’s where we are now.’”
Where they are now, apparently, is somewhere between acoustic guitars, Depeche Mode aesthetics, and songs that feel like choruses even when they don’t technically have them. “I love that observation,” he says when I point it out. “Some of my favorite songs—like All My Friends by LCD Soundsystem—don’t really have choruses. They just have tension and resolve. Maybe we don’t need the big hook. Maybe we’ve just been taught to think that’s the payoff.”
Healy’s own favorite track is the album closer, When We Are Together. “It wasn’t even supposed to be on the record,” he confesses. “We’d already delivered it. Then I pulled it back because there was one song I didn’t want on there, and we had two days to replace it.” Healy, George Daniel, and Jack Antonoff hit Electric Lady Studios and knocked it out fast—Healy on bass, George on drums, the whole thing sounding like someone painting a fence in late afternoon sunlight. “It’s the one I keep coming back to,” he says. “And I think that’s because there wasn’t time to overthink it.”
Not overthinking might be the closest thing Healy has to an artistic mantra. When asked what advice he’d give young artists, he doesn’t reach for platitudes. “Just trust your instincts,” he says. “If you sit there whiteboarding your ideas or comparing them to other stuff, you’ll never get to the good shit. Good art is what you see in your head. You’ve got to just do that.”
Healy’s instincts also led him into the producer’s chair for rising acts like Beabadoobee, and he hints more is on the way—“but not when I’m on an American tour,” he laughs. “I like doing one thing at a time.”
One thing he’s definitely still doing is pushing the visual side of The 1975. He co-writes all the band’s music videos and worked with director Samuel Bradley across the entire Being Funny campaign. “I haven’t done my 10,000 hours as a director yet,” he says. “So I write the ideas, and then I need someone brilliant to make them real.” Healy wanted someone “locked in a room” with him for six months to keep the tone cohesive. “It wouldn’t make sense for someone else to write the videos. It’s got to come from me. But Sam makes it cinematic.”
The black-and-white visuals for Part of the Band sparked Depeche Mode comparisons, and while Healy admits their influence—especially aesthetically—he credits Joy Division more directly. “We’re from Macclesfield, where Joy Division was from. We grew up around their kids and their history. You can’t escape that.”
Escape, however, is exactly what The 1975 have mastered: escape from genre constraints, from self-imposed irony, from boredom. “We’ve always been celebrated for being bold,” Healy says, “but really we’ve just avoided being bored.”
And if the result is an album that’s funny, romantic, anxious, stripped-back, theatrical, and occasionally devoid of choruses, well, that’s just the 1975 doing what they do best: being everything at once, as sincerely as possible, without looking directly into the camera—unless it helps the bit.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
