“I was exhausted and at the [risk] of being another statistic in that prescription drug opioid crisis that hit America, because that’s the way I dealt with things on tour.”
Matty Healy is sharing his truth through music. In a new interview, the lead vocalist and guitarist of the English rock band The 1975 discussed escaping to rehab after the band’s last album, “to really get away.”
Healy revealed that after winding down the band’s promotion of their 2016 album, I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it, the musician “wasn’t in a good place.”
“I was experiencing [some problems] and also thinking, fuck I need to make a record out of this without making a ‘poor me’ record. It’s so boring when you hear people do that, because they become unrelatable,” Healy said in the interview with DIY Magazine. “At the end of that album I was very concerned about the truth of what I was saying and the truth was me turning into that.”
But by sharing his bit of truth—by including the line in the band’s new single “Give Yourself a Try” about “get[ting] addicted to drugs”—Healy knows that plain honesty can resonate more than anything else.
“I don’t have anything else… I always talk about myself and people go, oh there’s a bit of me in that. And then you do that enough and it touches the world. That’s what people want. That’s what I want as well. Tell me the fucking truth,” he said.
“Let’s make this exchange really honest and I will, as a fan, give myself to you and not judge you if you just tell me the truth. And it makes far more interesting art, and that’s what I’m here for now I’ve decided.”
Healy admitted that he had a problem—“Oh yeah! Full on!”—which triggered his getaway to the island of Barbados. “When I went away to Barbados, I actually went to rehab… I went and worked with horses for seven weeks,” he said. “I didn’t get dragged away to rehab, I was exhausted and at the [risk] of being another statistic in that prescription drug opioid crisis that hit America, because that’s the way I dealt with things on tour.”
He continued, “I knew that I wasn’t going to detox myself, so I went away and I got clean. I wasn’t going there to get straight edge, I didn’t have a drinking problem or anything else, I was just chemically dependent on a substance and I didn’t wanna make a record as a fucking junkie. Who wants to hear that?”
The 1975’s third album A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships is due for release this coming October.
