The 1975’s Matty Healy Says Controversy Surrounding Podcast Comments About Ice Spice “Doesn’t Actually Matter”

The 1975 frontman Matty Healy is speaking out again on a recent controversy surrounding his participation in inappropriate comments made about rapper Ice Spice.

The singer faced backlash on social media following an interview in February on The Adam Friedland Show. At the time, the show’s host brought up that Ice Spice had said she was a fan of the band. But the host went on to make jokes about the “Princess Diana” rapper, saying she sounds like an “Inuit Spice Girl” and a “chubby Chinese lady.”

During the podcast episode that has since been removed from Apple and Spotify, Healy laughed and engaged with the host as they continued to mock accents of people of Chinese and Hawaiian descent, as well as comments about the singer sliding into Ice Spice’s DMs.

Billboard reported that Healy later somewhat apologized for his participation in the conversation during a 1975 concert in New Zealand. “I just feel a bit bad, and I’m kind of a bit sorry if I’ve offended you,” he said onstage at the time. “Ice Spice, I’m sorry. It’s not because I’m annoyed that me joking got misconstrued. It’s because I don’t want Ice Spice to think I’m a dick. I love you, Ice Spice. I’m so sorry. I don’t want it to be misconstrued as mean. I don’t mind being a bit of a joker … but I am genuinely sorry if I’ve upset them because I fucking love them.”

Now, during an interview with The New Yorker, published online Monday, The 1975 singer is saying the whole controversy “doesn’t actually matter.”

“Nobody is sitting there at night slumped at their computer, and their boyfriend comes over and goes, ‘What’s wrong, darling?’ and they go, ‘It’s just this thing with Matty Healy,’” he said. “That doesn’t happen.”

Healy then responded to fans who claim to be offended by his past remarks, saying, “You’re either deluded or you are, sorry, a liar. You’re either lying that you are hurt, or you’re a bit mental for being hurt. It’s just people going, ‘Oh, there’s a bad thing over there, let me get as close to it as possible so you can see how good I am.’ And I kind of want them to do that, because they’re demonstrating something so base level.”