FRONT MAN

Matty Healy, of the 1975, remains torn between the heartfelt and the arch.

- JIA TOLENTINO

In January, the thirty-four-year-old British rock star Matty Healy woke up on a couch in his house, except it was not his house, it was a stage set at the O2 Arena, in London, and twenty thousand people were there with him, screaming. His band, the 1975, stood in position among wood-panelled walls and framed family photos, and Healy— skinny, in a close-cut suit and a tie, black curls slicked back behind his ears— rose and dramatically blinked at the lights, took a swig from a flask, and sat down at a piano. Then he lit a cigarette and began to play the jittery riff that opens the band’s latest album, “Being Funny in a Foreign Language.” “You’re making an aesthetic out of not doing well /And mining all the bits of you you think you can sell,” he sang, taking long pulls from a bottle of red wine as the audience roared.

He sang the song’s refrain: “I’m sorry if you’re living and you’re seventeen.” When Healy and his three bandmates were that age—they have been a band, and best friends, for twenty years—they were mostly concerned with shows, records, parties, and girls, and they believed earnestly in the power of art to free themselves and change the world. Now, as Healy sees things, the average seventeen-year-old is worried about melting ice caps, or the failures of capitalism, or how easy it is to say the wrong thing. The future holds little imagined promise, and, to cope, teens are indulging in reactionary conservatism or the oppression Olympics, the world and their identities distorted by social media.