Fans of The 1975 will have to shake it off — Matty Healy won’t be featured on Taylor Swift’s next rerecording.
“Neither Matty Healy nor [The] 1975 are on this album,” a spokesperson for Swift, 33, told Billboard on Thursday, September 14, of the pop star’s upcoming 1989 (Taylor’s Version), which drops on October 27.
Swift and Healy have been friends for more than a decade. The pair were first romantically linked in 2014 when Swift was spotted at a few of The 1975’s concerts. Rumors swirled in April that they had rekindled a romance when Healy was spotted at multiple Eras Tour concerts following Swift’s split from Joe Alwyn. (Swift and Alwyn, 32, were together for nearly six years before calling it quits.)
While neither singer spoke publicly about their romance, a source exclusively told Us Weekly in May that the pair were “hanging out and are having fun together” and “have a lot of mutual friends, including Jack Antonoff.”
A second insider revealed that Swift and Healy were “having a good time reconnecting again” following their “brief” fling years prior, adding that Swift was “happy spending time” with the rocker.
After roughly one month of dating, Us confirmed the twosome had called it quits in June, with a source telling Us that they “had fun together” but it was “never serious.”
Despite their breakup, many fans still hoped Healy would make an appearance on 1989 (Taylor’s Version). Swift announced the latest rerelease during her final L.A. Eras Tour show in August.
“I figured that [this tour] would be fun but I did not know it would be like this. The last time I was pleasantly surprised by something you guys did was when I announced that I was going to be rerecording my first six albums,” she told concertgoers at the time. “The way you have embraced and celebrated that you’ve really decided it was your fight too and you were 100% behind me and if I care about it you care about it.”
Swift later reflected on what 1989 means to her as an artist — and revealed there would be 5 never before heard tracks from the vault on the rerecorded version.
“Surprise!! 1989 (Taylor’s Version) is on its way to you 🔜! The 1989 album changed my life in countless ways, and it fills me with such excitement to announce that my version of it will be out October 27th,” she wrote via her social media accounts. “To be perfectly honest, this is my most FAVORITE re-record I’ve ever done because the 5 From The Vault tracks are so insane. I can’t believe they were ever left behind. But not for long! Pre-order 1989 (Taylor’s Version) on my site 😎.”
Fans began theorizing that 1989 (Taylor’s Version) was coming long before she ever announced it, particularly with the release of “Wildest Dreams (Taylor’s Version)” — which hit TikTok in March 2021 — and “This Love (Taylor’s Version}” appearing in seasons 1 and 2 of The Summer I Turned Pretty.
This marks the fourth of Swift’s rereleases from her original catalog after she lost the rights to her masters in 2019 when Scooter Braun purchased them in a Big Machine Records acquisition. (The music mogul later sold the masters for $300 million to a private equity company.) Fearless (Taylor’s Version), Red (Taylor’s Version) and Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) were released in April 2021, November 2021 and July 2023, respectively.
