The 1975’s Matty Healy Made Emos Smile By Playing The American Football ‘Never Meant’ Riff In A New Clip

Just a few days ago, The 1975’s Matty Healy joined Dashboard Confessional to play their classic emo hit “Hands Down” at the Audacy Beach Festival in Fort Lauderdale. “Emo multiverse is glitching,” Healy captioned the Instagram video of him shredding with the band. Real ones know that this is not his first crossover with the genre; “I’m an active emo man, I suppose I’d call myself,” he said in 2019 in a radio interview, before name-dropping Joan Of Arc, Braid, and Mineral.

So it’s the perfect time for Healy to lean in harder. Guitarist Adam Hann shared an Instagram Story of Healy playing the iconic American Football “Never Meant” riff — the one that gets more and more memeified as time passes because of how instantly recognizable it is. You don’t have to know the song to know it; just scroll TikTok long enough and you’ll likely come across some video.

Emo is also notoriously one of the most gatekept genres, thus it’s no wonder why Healy has always been proving his relevance in and knowledge about the genre. When he was a surprise opener for Phoebe Bridgers at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles last year, he introduced his song “Sex” by calling it “an emo classic,” a comment that definitely pissed off a bunch of American Football fans. But he’s not wrong…