Matty Healy vs. the Taylor Swift Universe

thoughts after The 1975's Glastonbury performance

image from @the1975_thteam (X)

I’m a fan of Taylor Swift. I’m a fan of The 1975. I have been since their very first albums. (It was rare) I was there when Tumblr lost its mind the moment those pap pics of Taylor wearing The 1975 merch came out. And then lost its mind again when they realized that earlier that month, The 1975 frontman, Matty Healy, also wore a 1989 shirt on stage. So, I am trying to write this as objectively as possible. As a neutral child of Taylor and Matty’s divorce.

Jokes aside, I am writing this after having just watched the recorded livestream of The 1975’s June 2025 Glastonbury performance. Personally, I think the band did great, despite Matty looking visibly nervous and having lost what seems like the confidence and bravado he once had in previous years. (Having your character dissected and attacked relentlessly would probably do that to you, even if you were the most raw-meat-eating rockstar of rockstars.)

Long-time 1975 fans know that headlining Glastonbury Music Festival's Pyramid Stage, with a staggering 210,000 capacity, has always been one of Matty’s dreams. He had repeatedly said so in past interviews—ones that I can’t even find or link to now because they've been buried under all these current headlines linking his career-defining moment with none other than, you guessed it, Taylor Juggernaut Swift.

Are we even surprised? No. But I am a little disappointed.

If you haven’t caught on yet, Taylor Swift stopped selling music years ago. That’s child’s play for her now. Music may be the vehicle to deliver the product, but for the longest time, Taylor has been selling something else: the Taylor Swift Universe (TSU).

Akin to the Marvel Universe, if you aren’t familiar with the standalone franchises, then Avengers: Endgame probably won’t mean that much to you, other than being a decent superhero movie. But if you were really in on it, then you were probably one of the people cheering and standing up from your seats at certain points. Similarly, music critics and listeners who weren’t in on the Taylor Swift Universe were the ones who deeply disliked her most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD), released in April 2024 in the heels of the dissolution of her six-year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn and her two(?) months-long fling (possibly decade-long situationship) with Matty Healy. Critics and online reviewers alike noted that the newer songs were just a rehash of the old ones, both lyrically and melodically. For instance, But Daddy I Love Him was just a more mature version of Love Story. “She had already done this before but better,” was essentially the consensus. “Repetitive.” “Boring.”

But it seems Taylor Swift cares more about feeding and growing the TSU than appeasing music critics. And why wouldn’t she? She had already won whatever there is to win. To her brand, getting Swifties to compare the new songs with the old is the more strategic move—to have old and new fans alike follow the clues. And to do that, she has to leave obvious nods to past work. Because that’s the allure of the TSU. If you’re in it, you’re in it for the lore, and the lore is in the music. Business-wise, it’s also a surefire way to get her more plays and to ensure her past work continues to be relevant.

Not that Taylor’s music itself isn’t good—because it is. But I think some of her best work consists of songs that don’t add much to her lore, like I Hate It Here, I Look in People’s Windows, and Robin from The Anthology alone. These songs show Taylor’s range and depth best, but they’re also among the least played.

Now, back to the Matty Healy of it all. If you hadn’t heard what has caused all these headlines cheapening the band’s success this past weekend, it’s two things:

1. A Peter Pan pin Matty wore, and

2. Matty saying: “What this moment is making me realize is that I probably am the best. I’m probably the best songwriter of my generation. The best, what do we say… A poet, ladies and gentlemen, is what I am.” (What a dumbass.)

Let’s start with number 2. To quote The 1975’s lyrics, “Like context in a modern debate / I just took it out.” And many news articles did take the context out in favor of profitable clicks.

But here is the context: Matty said all of that before singing one of the tracks that made the band big globally, Chocolate. Despite being one of their most popular songs, the way Matty sings it has always been criticized and made fun of—so much so that the band had decided to steer into the skid, and with every Chocolate performance, the words had grown more gibberish. To make sure that people got the joke, they even flashed gibberish lyrics on the stage as Matty sang. “These lyrics, this poetry I bleed for you,” he quipped.

said poetry flashed on the stage so everybody could sing along

That was what he was referencing. But the TSU is so huge, it’s hard to escape from—especially after Matty dipped his toes in it and cemented his starring role—and Matty’s “poet” comment immediately brought to mind Taylor’s TTPD. Now the headlines for one of the band’s career-defining moments ran along the lines of “Matty Healy taunts ex, Taylor Swift” or “Healy makes a dig at ex,” and the Swifties, with their online pitchforks, are crying, “The smallest man who ever lived!” Contrast all of that to Matty exclaiming on stage, “Look at us; we did it! It only took us 23 years, but we did it!” and you'll realize just how much the band’s moment was buried in the noise that followed.

But we can’t blame Taylor. Like she prefaced in TTPD, “All is fair in love and poetry,” a sentiment I agree with. Despite being a dumbass in front of a camera and making a lot of messes before accepting he’s never gonna be effective at being political, Matty is intelligent. He knew what he was getting into. In fact, he often dissected and wrote about the online sphere—the place where Swifties love to gather.

He also clocked what Taylor was doing with TSU before some Swifties and music critics even did or were ready to admit. In an appearance on the Doomscroll podcast, Matty said:

“A lot of artists, they become very interested in their lore, or they become interested in the things that have happened outside of their art that people know about, and they want to address that. And fair enough, do you know what I mean? I think that that’s an obvious thing to draw from. And I’m just not interested in it.”

(Of course, whether or not he did mean that as a dig on Taylor, the Swifties took it as one and did not like it one bit.)

So, this grown man knew what he was getting into and decided it was worth a shot. There is no one to blame but himself.

That said, what Matty probably didn’t expect was Taylor Swift taking a piss all over his discography, too. She made sure that with TTPD and TTPD: The Anthology, she was forever intertwined with The 1975 and that they wouldn’t be able to escape her orbit that easily. Not even including one of their biggest songs, About You—which is already tied to Cardigan, because the two basically confirmed publicly that they dedicated these songs to each other (if not wrote them about each other)—Taylor weaved her presence lyrically and sonically against tracks like fallingforyou and Me & You Together Song with imgonnagetyouback, or Somebody Else with Fortnight.

Which brings me to the Peter Pan pin. Matty has long referred to himself and the band as “Peter Pan and The Lost Boys,” even penning a song titled Lost Boys under the band Drive Like I Do, which was The 1975 before they were The 1975. And yet, it seems he can’t reference Peter Pan publicly anymore, thanks to Taylor’s The Anthology track Peter. Like Matty’s “Jehovah’s Witness suit,” Peter Pan now belongs to the TSU and therefore will be received by the masses mostly through its lens. Hell, the man can’t even share The Blue Nile’s music in his Instagram story without making the headlines claiming he was taunting Taylor Swift. Like one commenter wrote, “If he has always liked The Blue Nile, then he has the right to continue to like The Blue Nile.” But not to the Swifties, no. And not to the media too, apparently. Because, to them, The Blue Nile now belongs to the TSU.

I can’t stop thinking about how ironic it is that, for many years, Matty Healy has been trying to bring to life a sort of character onstage and in public. And now he is notorious for being that character… but in the context of another artist’s world. And how Taylor Swift has always been an advocate for controlling one’s own narrative, yet her empire has swallowed other artists whole. Whether intentionally or not, her story often overshadows others’, not necessarily out of malice, but simply because of how massive and all-consuming her cultural presence has become.

At the end of The 1975’s Glastonbury set, the word DOGS flashed on the screens in red and in all caps. DOGS was also printed on the 1975’s drummer George Daniel's drumhead, prompting the speculation that it has something to do with the band’s next album. Now that Matty’s claimed that the band wants to lay low on being political and that he is not interested in writing about his “casual romantic liaisons,” I am excited to see what the next album will be about. Will he finally break free from the Taylor Swift Universe? Will the next album the band puts out be received objectively and not viewed through the Taylor Swift lens? My guess… is no.

As a Taylor Swift fan, I just know that die-hard Swifties will be insufferable the day a new The 1975 album drops, and that anything and everything that can be connected to Taylor will be—and will subsequently be absorbed as part of the Taylor Swift Universe. And as a The 1975 fan, that sucks.

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