Matty Healy and the 1975 are back on tour after a relay of reeducation

Matty Healy has had a difficult time lately. A year ago, the leader of 1975 entered a rehab center in Barbados to seek treatment for heroin addiction.

Seven weeks later, he left the clinic as a man changed to face new challenges.

"I lost a lot of self-confidence when I came out of rehab," he says. "I had no record and I had been defined two years ago by something that existed."

This "something" was the second album of the group, which had tremendous success, entitled "I like it like that when you sleep, because you are so beautiful and yet so unconscious". He is number one in the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as in New Zealand and Australia. It also earned the group a prestigious Mercury Award nomination.

Now, Healy and the band are back with a new album – to be released tomorrow – and their first New Zealand concert for three years.

It's been over a year since the band played and Healy is anxious to get back on stage and reconnect with his character.

"I do not like being me most of the time, that 's why I feel a lot freer when I go on stage because I do not have to be me.

"I think if you're on stage, people have already given you the benefit of the doubt, so the things that worry you for yourself, it's kind of an environment to celebrate."

The group took two years of touring to focus on their album A Brief Investigation of Online Relations, which will be followed shortly by another disc, Notes on a Conditional Form, due out in April.

This means that by the time they arrive in New Zealand next September, they have already released four complete albums since their first appearance on the music scene in 2014.

"I think it's just the rate of music consumption," says Healy, a native of the English countryside, where he repeats with the band before the tour.

"I do not make singles, write albums, then take a few songs and take them in. I did not really want to do a two-year tour of the modern world. but rather to do more, but I also felt it was not expressive enough. "

Healy says that fans can expect the next two albums to repeat the 1975 story with coherences they will recognize from their previous records.

"It's the story of me, but I do not think they're going to [the records] to be intrinsically linked, they are not linked together, they are not remotely the same body of work. "

LOWDOWN
Who: The 1975
What: New album A brief survey of online relationships to be released tomorrow
Live show: Spark Arena, 18 September