The 1975’s Matty Healy Discusses His Drug Addiction, Equine-Assisted Rehab

Kevin Winter/Getty Images

The 1975’s Matty Healy Discusses His Drug Addiction, Equine-Assisted Rehab

Kevin Winter/Getty Images

On the new 1975 song, “Give Yourself A Try,” which came out last week, frontman Matty Healy alludes to his struggle with drug addiction in the wake of becoming rich and famous: “You’ll make a lot of money and it’s funny ‘cus you’ll move somewhere sunny and get addicted to drugs,” he sings.

It’s the lead single from the first of two albums the band plans to release in the next twelve months, with the first (A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships due out in October. Neither album is done, however, despite those ambitious release plans, and a new cover story in DIY magazine their recent creative process, where they’ve been holed up in the countryside over the last few months trying to finish the albums.

Healy also opens up about the decision to check himself into a rehab facility in Barbados at the end of the touring cycle for the 1975’s last album. “I went and worked with horses for seven weeks. I didn’t get dragged away to rehab, I was fucking exhausted and at the [risk] of being another statistic in that prescription drug opioid crisis that hit America, because that’s the way I dealt with things on tour,” he says, and continues:

I loved going out on stage and talking to 12,000 people. I didn’t like going back to my hotel room and sitting on my own for another three hours and then being expected to go to bed when I wanted to, I don’t know, change culture or something ridiculously grandiose. […] And I knew that I wasn’t going to detox myself, so I went away and I got clean. I wasn’t going there to get straight edge, I didn’t have a drinking problem or anything else, I was just chemically dependent on a substance and I didn’t wanna make a record as a fucking junkie. Who wants to hear that?

Read the full story here.

more from News