This article appears in the pages of #VMAN43 our forthcoming Spring/Summer Issue.

Over the last half-decade, The 1975’s Matty Healy became ubiquitous, as did his band’s percussive, dancey sound. With his Energizer-Bunny stage presence and semi-nonsensical lyrics, no one embodied feel-good pop-rock like Healy. But then, in August, the band took a spiked club to that reputation. “I wanted everything [about it] to be uncomfortable,” says Healy of the video for screamo single “People,” the first release off forthcoming album Notes on a Conditional Form. “It was a true expression; we wrote the song in a night [when] we were just feeling especially engaged and angry.”

While the aesthetic extremes of “People” may have been a one-off—the oil-slick Marilyn Manson hairdo Healy rocked was, in fact, a wig—its messaging reflected the confrontational posture that Healy has assumed within his art and without. In addition to lyrical declarations like, “Wake up, it’s Monday morning and we’ve only got a thousand of them left,” the singer has contributed to the public discourse. In the last year, he’s publicly nudged a few fellow musicians toward the purposeful-pop bandwagon. “I am not any of the ‘ists’…I am not a fascist, I am not a racist, I am not a misogynist, or any of those things… Because of that, I don’t live my life in fear [of being] cancelled or misrepresented. So I am going to say how I feel,” says Healy. He has a lot to say, judging by the length and breadth of Notes. Though a stylistic departure, the 22-track album dropping in April is a companion piece to the 2018 LP A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships. “We said, ‘Let’s just do two albums; we have [enough] ideas for it,’” Healy recalls. “Cultural change happens so quickly now that we couldn’t imagine touring just one album for the next two years.” (The band’s 2020 leg kicks off April 27.)

Though Healy himself may be in the business of truth-telling, his TV-watching habits are unabashedly escapist. “I am fucking obsessed with [British reality show] Love Island,” he professes. “There’s so much drama with so little consequence; it’s like play fighting. I really like that.” It seems the singer’s soft spot for pop remains intact after all. SAMUEL ANDERSON