Matty Healy of The 1975. Photo by Marcelo Hernandez/Getty Images
Next week, The 1975 will restart their world tour in North America before heading to the rest of the world. Since those dates were originally announced in the summer, the band’s frontman Matty Healy has gone from the enfant terrible of pop music to, uh, the adulte terrible of pop music thanks to heightened scrutiny over offensive podcast comments made earlier in the year, a brief romance with Taylor Swift, and forcing the cancelation of a Malaysian music festival thanks to an onstage same-sex kiss (that festival has ordered the band to pay $2.5 million or face court proceedings). In a new ad for The 1975’s tour dates, Healy makes a nod to the controversy, styling it in the vein of a political campaign ad with the theme of redemption.
Healy stars as the ad’s “politician,” and makes the kind of rounds you’d expect from an ad like this: wearing a suit, he mingles with a carpenter and serves food, inter-spliced with stock footage of veterans and students, that kind of thing. This being Matty Healy, though, it’s not quite as faithful a duplicate: there’s a shot of him doing pushups shirtless and a cutaway to his guest spot on the Adam Friedland Show, the podcast appearance that got him in trouble in the first place. It’s kind of funny even if it does feel a little like a Daily Show bit. Watch below.
