It’s been quite a year for Matty Healy. First, he clocked possibly the fastest relationship-to-revenge-album turnaround time in the Taylor Swift canon. Then, he started dating model-slash-musician Gabbriette Bechtel. And now, after weathering said revenge album’s release, he appears to have gotten engaged to model and musician Gabbriette at a Charli XCX concert. Rat men really are in their prime!
On Tuesday night, Healy and Gabbriette, who were first seen making out in New York in September, surfaced in the crowd at Charli XCX’s live show for her new album, Brat, in Brooklyn. That same night, Gabbriette posted an Instagram Story showing her left hand with a black diamond ring. In the album’s now-signature green hue, she wrote, “Marrying the 1975 is very brat” and tagged Healy’s social-media alter ego, Truman Black. On Wednesday, Healy’s mother, Denise Welch, confirmed on her talk show, Loose Women, that her son had been engaged to Gabbriette for “a few weeks” and that she is “everything that I could want in a daughter-in-law.” She described Gabbriette as such: “She is from Los Angeles, she is absolutely gorgeous, she does have a rat” — referring, I can only assume, to the woman’s pet and not to her new fiancé.
If you are wondering why there is so much brand integration going on here, Gabbriette and Charli XCX go way back. In 2019, the then-model starred in Charli’s short-lived docuseries about putting together a band called Nasty Cherry, in which Gabbriette was the lead singer and songwriter. She’s featured prominently in Charli’s current album cycle, popping up in the “It” girl–packed “360” music video and getting name-dropped in the song’s lyrics.
To really bring things full circle — and explain what is so “brat” about “marrying the 1975” — Charli is engaged to the 1975’s drummer, George Daniel, and based on some of Brat’s lyrics, she is at least a little invested in who’s hanging around her step-bandmates. In the song “Sympathy is a knife,” she sings about a woman (probably Taylor Swift) who “taps my insecurities,” and adds, “Don’t wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show / Fingers crossed behind my back, I hope they break up.”
Sounds like she got her way this time around?
This post has been updated.
