Who Even Is Matty Healy? A guide to talking Taylor Swift with your daughters, sisters, and wives

As you should know by now unless you have 0 exposure to any women between the ages of 9 and 40, Taylor Swift recently released a new album “The Tortured Poets Department” which included 15 bonus tracks making it a 31 track album. Many fans thought the album would be about her years long and now ended relationship with Joe Alwyn but instead it seems the bulk majority of the album is about a relatively short lived affair with Matty Healy (in my opinion it’s actually about Donald Trump). 

So who the heck is Matt Healy and why did the most famous woman in the world write 20 songs about him (give or take)? 

Here’s the tea so you can keep up with your sisters, daughters and wives until football season returns: 

Matt Healy is the front man for the band The 1975 

About You by The 1975#The1975 pic.twitter.com/5THCYP9Cty

— The 1975 TH (@the1975_thteam) April 18, 2024

Matt Healy is a singer/songwriter who is with the indie pop/alternative band The 1975. The fact that the band was allegedly named after margin notes written in Healy’s copy of the Kerouac novel On the Road should be all you really need to know about the kind of music The 1975 produces and what Healy is about. The band likes to be intellectual, performative and speak to art that is more broad than simply the music itself. 

The band has had multiple number one hits on the UK Charts and also perform well in the United States within their category. Industry experts considered The 1975 to be not only a good band but an influential one who has spurred trends in music since their inception. 

Matt Healy is controversial (especially on the left)

In February of this year, Matty appeared on a podcast where he, his friend & the host laughed as they made racist comments, this included calling @icespicee_ a “chubby Chinese lady”, and mocking API accents. The episode was so offensive + racist that Apple and Spotify removed it. pic.twitter.com/Lbok9nd3nO

— victor🦄 (@beyisover) May 6, 2023

Despite The 1975’s critical and commercial success in music, Matt Healy has been a consistent feature of criticism primarily, but not exclusively, leftists who would ostensibly be primed to like his more pretentious style of art. The Telegraph published an article asking whether or not Healy was the “most offensive” man in pop. The Independent asserted that he was a “tough pill to swallow.”

Healy’s shows are full of antics where the front man displays “performance art” such as simulating masturbation, eating chunks of raw steak, making out with audience members and anything more you can imagine. According to reports, the crowd never really knows what to do with him. 

But beyond his style of showmanship, Healy has been the subject of social and political controversy. 

Some have called Healy a “racist” for making rude comments about the singer (and friend of Swift) Ice Spice. He went on the Adam Friedland show and called Ice Spice a “chubby Chinese Lady” and an “Inuit” and then mimicked accents of those ethnic groups. It’s pretty rude and it’s definitely culturally insensitive. The censorship police had it removed from streaming platforms pretty quickly. 

In the same show, Healy laughs at an impression of a theoretical Japanese “foreign exchange” worker helping the Nazis (I think?). So he was actually mocking Nazis in this segment but because he laughed at someone else doing an east asian accent (in a rude way) he was also implicated as a racist. 

And here’s audio of Matty Healy laughing as he encourages the hosts to do mock impressions of Japanese accents. pic.twitter.com/n7yhKvvSJw

— victor🦄 (@beyisover) May 6, 2023

Additionally, when supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, leftists weren’t happy with him tweeting in support but linking it to his new song. They thought that was self-promotional on the backs of the people they said were suffering so very much.

He also openly discredits Islam and extremist Islam ran countries. When lefties online tried to call him racist and say that ISIS and Islam aren’t interchangeable, he asked the simple question of what the punishment for apostasy (evangelizing religion that is not Islam) is in the religious texts of Islam and in Muslim nations? It’s death in the case of the texts and for most muslim ran governments. Looking at the leftist fever around supporting Hamas and Palestine despite their archaic and brutal rules and way of life, it’s not surprising that leftists think challenging Islamic beliefs is “racist.” 

Healy frequently thumbs his nose at the thought police and has even outright stated his refusal to be a “pawn” to the left. He called out the culture war going on and has said he doesn’t really care about being called a “racist” or anything else by internet haters. 

Probably the cherry on the ice cream of controversy was the time he did a Nazi salute in a concert. Said to be satire. 

There are more crimes the left has levied against Healy, you can see a pretty good summation here from The Pearl Clutchers Digest The Mary Sue.

What does this have to do with Taylor Swift

we need to do a case study on parasocial relationships with celebrities because like 😭😭 pic.twitter.com/YvyrKeLjON

— maxine (@mgxine) May 17, 2023

Taylor Swift briefly dated Matt Healy in 2023. The two actually met in 2014 and have known each other since but both deny that they dated until the 2023 timeframe during her Eras tour. Swift’s new album makes timeline references that may discredit the idea that the two weren’t more of a pair at least on-and-off from 2014 to today. Now Swift is famously coupled with Kansas City Chiefs star, Travis Kelce and Matt Healy is with someone else as well. 

The major takeaway from the Swift Healy affair in 2023 wasn’t so much the relationship itself but the revelation of the toxic side of Swift’s superfandom. Swift’s fans were so displeased with her dating Healy (due to the controversies outlined above) that they tried to force her to break up with him by threatening to abandon her music, bullying her online and writing all kinds of tragic think pieces about how she was basically a racist by association. It was really a weird and scary thing to see happen. Swift seemingly references this behavior in her song (though it may not have been about Healy) in her new song “But Daddy I Love Him.” 

How do we know The Tortured Poets Department is mostly about Matt Healy? 

How does Matt Healy feel about Taylor Swift’s ‘Tortured Poets Department’? https://t.co/Il4HpIWU6f pic.twitter.com/tZB1vqi1Xn

— Kaiser@Celebitchy (@KaiseratCB) April 22, 2024

We don’t really know who all the songs are about. But Taylor Swift is famous for leaving clues and easter eggs to help fans identify who she’s singing about in her work. The ones left in The Tortured Poets Department seem pretty obvious such as references to smoking, typewriters and key locations. For a full breakdown of proof – check out the myriad of videos like this online or ask your daughter.

So wait: who tf is Joe Alwyn? 

No one knows.