The 1975’s Matty Healy Opens Up About Heroin Addiction and the ‘Emotional Hangover’ That Followed His Bandmate’s Intervention

The 1975’s Matty Healey got candid about his struggles with addiction and how his heroin use marked one of the first real tests for the band in a new interview with Zane Lowe. The full episode airs today, Oct. 12, at 1 p.m. ET on Apple Music 1. 

As Healy explained, his heroin use was “the first time where there had been anything that one of us was doing, or was into, that the others weren’t… It was the first time I had to tell them something. It was the first time that the idea of a secret existing even came out. It’s almost as if, well, is there anything else that we’ve not known? Because that’s a big thing.”

Healy went on to recall the night his bandmates finally intervened while the 1975 were working on 2018’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships. Despite their concerns, Healy admitted he pushed back; though he never went so far as cursing out his bandmates, instead essentially telling them, “No, you need to respect my drug addiction!” 

The next morning, Healy quipped, he woke up with an “emotional hangover,” thinking, “Oh my God, not only was that the wrong thing to say, that was so cringe. Because I know that they will get over that, but that’s going to be an anecdote that they’ll take the piss out of me for years for — that’s the first thing I need to think about.”

Healy went on to discuss his road to recovery, including the striking realization that accompanied his arrival at a rehab facility, where he met so many people where there because they’d lost everything. In contrast, he acknowledged, “I’d not lost anything. I’d nearly lost the respect of everybody I loved, but I hadn’t. Hadn’t lost my career. Hadn’t lost my possessions. Hadn’t lost my money. I was just walking a very, very thin line. I think that I was lucky enough in my condition in the way that I am as a person to recognize that what needed to be done needed to be done.”

Healy’s interview with Lowe arrives ahead of the release of the 1975’s new album, Being Funny in a Foreign Language, which is set to drop this Friday, Oct. 14. The album follows 2020’s Notes On a Conditional Form.