Earlier this year, Taylor Swift fans were left shocked when it was reported that she had split from her boyfriend Joe Alwyn after six and a half years together.
Joe — who largely avoided the public eye — was the muse behind several of Taylor’s songs on her last five albums, and listeners were blindsided by the breakup.
A source explained: “She and Matty are madly in love. It’s super-early days, but it feels right. They first dated, very briefly, almost ten years ago but timings just didn’t work out.”
“They are both massively proud and excited about this relationship and, unlike Taylor’s last one — which was very much kept out of the spotlight, deliberately — she wants to ‘own’ this romance, and not hide it away,” the insider added.
Just two days after the news broke, Matty was spotted in the VIP tent at Taylor’s Eras tour in Nashville. He ended up attending all three shows at the weekend, and even performed with Taylor’s opening act, Phoebe Bridgers, on Saturday.
Entertainment Tonight later reported that Taylor and The 1975’s collaborator Jack Antonoff was the one who’d “reconnected” her and Matty. A source added: “Taylor has a crush on Matty, and they are having a good time hanging out. Matty also thinks Taylor is awesome and incredibly talented, too."
However, the rumored new pairing has not gone down well with Taylor’s fans, who have fiercely criticized her decision to associate with the British star.
This is due to Matty’s very recent history of incredibly problematic behavior, which has been broken down in a viral Twitter thread that includes a video of him seemingly doing the Nazi salute on stage in January.
Matty has even made nasty comments about Taylor herself in the past, saying that it would be “emasculating” to date her. Here is everything that you need to know about Matty’s controversies.
In case you didn’t know, The 1975 have been on tour these past few months, and Matty was raising eyebrows long before his highly publicized reconciliation with Taylor.
As mentioned, just days after International Holocaust Remembrance Day in January, Matty was accused of doing the Nazi salute while marching on stage during one of his shows.
In the clip, he is performing “Love It If We Made It,” which includes a reference to one of Taylor’s enemies, Kanye West, with the lyric: “Thank you Kanye, very cool,” which is when the salute happened.
Some fans defended his gesture at the time by insisting that it was satire and his way of calling other people Nazis. But this defense did not sit right with critics, and TikToker Danielle Silverstone argued: “It doesn’t fucking matter; he’s not Jewish, he’s not Romani, he doesn’t get to do that.”
“Oh, but he was saying Kanye and Trump were Nazis without saying it, and he needed to do a symbol that is literally banned in Germany and that makes people feel unsafe?” Danielle went on.
That same month, Matty posted a screenshot of a “List of Jews” Wikipedia page to his Instagram Story, which some deemed to be an unsettling reference to the records of Jewish people that Nazis kept during the Holocaust.
Matty courted even more controversy in February when he appeared on The Adam Friedland Show podcast and laughed hysterically as the host made a series of racist jibes.
Adam referred to American rapper Ice Spice as “one of the Inuit Spice Girls” and a “chubby Chinese lady” before mocking a variety of accents. Matty said that he’d messaged Ice Spice, and was asked: “So you slide into her DMs and ask ‘What are you? A fucking Eskimo or something?’”
The episode was so offensive that Apple and Spotify removed it from their platforms. However, it is still available to listen to on YouTube.
In April, Matty finally acknowledged the offense caused by his comments during one of The 1975’s New Zealand shows. Insisting that his “joking got misconstrued,” Matty said: “I just feel a bit bad, and I’m kind of sorry if I’ve offended you. Ice Spice, I’m sorry.”
And rather than attempt to veer away from accusations of racism, Matty appears to thrive on the controversy and even poked fun at his growing reputation during a the 1975 gig earlier this year.
While on stage in Leeds, Matty teased that he was about to go on a racist rant as he said: “I don’t think it’s a racist thing to say…” before his bandmates cut him off by playing the beginning of the next song.
Throughout this tour, Matty has also come under scrutiny for kissing unsuspecting women in the crowd, and sucking on their fingers.
But while many of the singer’s troubling antics are from very recently, he has been hitting the headlines for years. In 2016, he left people puzzled by his “Messiah complex” in an interview with the Guardian.
“There is an element of feeling a bit like the Messiah. Well, not somebody who’s here to save humanity, but somebody for whom the world does truly revolve around them,” he said of himself at the time.
Then in 2019, the backlash began when he was accused of thinly-veiled Islamophobia.
In an interview with Mexican outlet Brut Mexico, Matty said that religious people “should be kind of ashamed” of themselves before complaining that he has no “rights” as an atheist.
“And I never get a day. I never get a day where I’m allowed to be offended… Where are my rights as an atheist?” he asked.
Matty also once posted a screenshot of a tweet to his Instagram story that read: “you start dating a muslim girl then BOOM.”
In 2020, the star was criticized again when he seemingly utilized the Black Lives Matter movement to promote the 1975’s 2018 song, “Love It If We Made It.”
Matty was called out for attempting to capitalize on the murder of George Floyd, and ultimately ended up deleting the tweet in question. However, shortly after he removed it he seemingly had a change of heart and posted another link to the song.
And although Matty is a self-proclaimed feminist, he has been accused of misogyny over the years as well. During an interview with two young women, he admitted to being stunned by the depth of their questions because of the way that they look.
He said: “These are quite heavy questions for girls dressed like you two.”
When one of the women said that they were a “little bit offended” by that remark, he argued: “You’re, like, a pretty girl, I’m going to have certain stereotypes.”
And similarly to his fans’ defense of the allegations of racism and antisemitism that Matty faces, he has insisted that whenever the 1975 objectify women in their music videos they do it in an ironic way — suggesting that this makes it OK.
Speaking to Teen Vogue in 2016, Matty said: “In all of our videos, whenever we’ve used girls, we’re referencing the irony or the parody that should exist. In the ‘Girls’ video, for instance, they’re all in ridiculous lingerie, and they’re all white and skinny, but it was parody [of the music industry and society.]”
His controversial comments about Taylor were made that same year, with Matty getting incredibly defensive when quizzed on whether or not he’d dated the popstar during an interview with Q magazine.
He initially dismissed Taylor by saying that she “wasn't a big impact on my life," and then ranted: “If I had [properly] gone out with Taylor Swift the first thing I would’ve [thought was] ‘Fucking hell I am NOT being Taylor Swift’s boyfriend.’ You know, FUCK. THAT.”
“That’s also a man thing, a de-masculinating, emasculating thing,” Matty added.
