Last year, the 1975 announced plans for an indefinite break following the conclusion of their Still… At Their Very Best tour, scheduled to end on March 24. With just over a month of shows left, frontman Matty Healy has continued to reassure fans that their hiatus will turn into something more permanent. At a recent concert in Birmingham, he previewed a few seconds from music the band has been working on for their next album that fittingly reflects their reason for taking the break.
“We’re working on a new record now. I just need to stop for, like, a minute,” Healy told the audience, acknowledging that “everyone’s kind of afraid that we’re going to go away for ages.” Stepping away from the piano, he played a song from a voice note on his phone into his microphone, then recited one of the lyrics: “I take a minute when I think I won’t die from stopping.”
“That’s really how I’ve felt for a long time,” he explained. “We really appreciate you guys and thank you so much. We’re going to go away and hopefully make you a good new album. I just don’t know what to do in the meantime, really.”
During past breaks in between tours, the 1975 have spent their time resting and then inevitably returning to the studio to create more music. They took three years in between the tours for their 2013 self-titled debut album and their 2016 album I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It. The break following that tour was shorter, with the Music for Cars tour beginning in 2018 in support of A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships — and later Notes on a Conditional Form — and running through March 2020, when the pandemic resulted in its early end.
The 1975’s fifth studio album, Being Funny in a Foreign Language, was released in October 2022. They performed 93 shows supporting the record on the At Their Very Best tour, then returned for another 33 shows in North America and 27 in Europe on the Still… At Their Very Best tour. Their time on the road overlapped with a number of controversial moments for Healy, who has used the stage as a podium to explain himself to an audience he seems to feel understands him to a degree more than the general public might.
Last year, he told an audience in San Jose: “I didn’t mean to scare any hardcore fans by insinuating that we were splitting up or anything like that. That’s not happening. Don’t worry about that … There just needs to be a very firm, full stop at the end of Still… At Their Very Best. Because I kind of still know what I’m doing, but part of me doesn’t.”