The 1975’s Matty Healy quits social media: “The era of me being a fucking arsehole is coming to an end”
The 1975 frontman Matty Healy has quit social media, telling fans that he’s “had enough”.
- READ MORE: The NME Big Read – The 1975: “I’d rather be a pretend supervillain than some pretend hero”
The singer deactivated his Instagram account (@trumanblack) at some point last weekend, according to the Evening Standard.
It came after Healy told the audience during The 1975’s concert in Adelaide, Australia on Monday (April 10) that he would be coming offline once again.
“It’s because everything happens in eras,” he reportedly explained of his decision. “The 1975 is a very eras band. The era of me being a fucking arsehole is coming to an end. I’ve had enough.”
The frontman continued: “I perform all the time and it’s my job and I love doing this but I can’t perform off the stage anymore as I just want to be a bloke.”
Back in 2020, Healy deactivated his Twitter account after being criticised for sharing a post about George Floyd that included a link to The 1975’s single ‘Love It If We Made It’ (the track includes the line: “Selling melanin and then suffocate the Black men“).
Later that year, he said he had become a “much better person” since he stopped posting online.
“[Qutting social media] was obviously in reaction to being thoughtless and getting cancelled initially, but that’s something that had become an almost weekly occurrence,” he explained at the time.
Healy then denied “running away from Twitter” during an interview last summer: “I was just like, ‘You know what? If I want to write about the culture war, I don’t wanna be a pawn in it anymore’.”
He claimed in the same conversation that “people took shit seriously before Twitter”.
Healy is also known for ‘shitposting’, which Google defines as “the activity of posting deliberately provocative or off-topic comments on social media, typically in order to upset others or distract from the main conversation”.
Speaking to NME for a Big Read cover interview in 2022, the musician was asked how he was enjoying the life of a shitposter.
“That’s probably the right question for me!” he laughed in response. “I think it’s fine. You can’t do both. I’m not a baddie, but I’ve never pretended to be perfect.”
He continued: “All that woke shit that I used to crack on about… I come from art.”
More recently, Healy and Yungblud came to blows on social media after the ’75 singer sparked controversy over his appearance on The Adam Friedland Show.
The podcast saw Healy discuss how he believed Harry Styles “gets a pass” on criticism over alleged “queer-baiting”, and talked about New York rapper Ice Spice‘s heritage – debating whether she has Hawaiian, Inuit or Chinese heritage and impersonating the accents of those countries and regions.
The 1975 are due to play huge outdoor shows in London’s Finsbury Park, Dublin’s St. Anne’s Park, and Musgrave Park in Cork this summer. They’ll also headline TRNSMT Festival in Glasgow, Radio 1’s Big Weekend in Dundee, and Manchester’s Parklife.
