Everything Everything: “We can’t afford to take three years off”
Everything Everything make smooth, meticulously produced indie-pop accessible enough to be aired on daytime radio. However, a dark underbelly has always been part of the band’s make-up and rears its head on their new dystopian concept album, Mountainhead.
The record challenges the flaws of the capitalist system and life in the age of the social-media grifter. It’s a heavy topic for a pop record, but Everything Everything have made a career out of turning existential ideas into danceable anthems.
The murky political climate has been a background figure within their music throughout the last decade, from the rise of conspiracy theorists on 2015’s ‘No Reptiles’ from Get to Heaven to exploring the dark side of artificial intelligence on 2022’s Raw Data Feel.
This time, Everything Everything created a fictional universe home to the Mountainheads cult. The militant group believes that for society to flourish, they need to enhance the size of the mountaintop and devote their lives at the bottom of the pit to enrich the lives of those above.
For frontman Jonathan Higgs, who is speaking over Zoom ahead of a performance at The Plaza in Stockport, having this imaginable world to fall back on was “liberating” and meant he “didn’t have to abide by the same rules as this world” during songwriting.
When devising an imaginary cult, Higgs wanted to create an idea that “was visually memorable and striking, but also had the sense of pointlessness about it”. The deeper meaning behind Everything Everything’s music is deliberately tacit, and the idea of being a preachy political singer-songwriter makes Higgs shudder.
“We hate the idea of concept and theme getting in the way of our music; it’s always the song that comes first. It’s always written as a good, enjoyable pop song before I’ve written a single word before I’ve put any of this stuff into it,” he explains of their process.
Higgs describes the political messaging in Mountainhead as an “extra layer” for fans to digest rather than a bid to become the next Billy Bragg. Take ‘The End of the Contender’, on the surface, is a glistening pop record, but its muse is Ronnie Pickering, who rose to prominence in 2015 thanks to a road rage incident that quickly went viral of him repeatedly shouting, “Don’t you know who I am? I’m Ronnie Pickering.”
After researching Pickering, Higgs discovered that he was an amateur boxer in the 1970s. He found his journey from sporting hero to social media villain “emblematic” of “these old guys who suddenly find themselves seriously unpopular”.
Higgs elaborates: “They’re being told that they’re too white. They’re too old. They’re out of date. And yeah, some people change to fit society as it moves along. And some people don’t, or they can’t. And some people get really, really angry about it. And there was just something about this guy’s rage that no one knew who he was anymore.”
While artists can tend to look down upon this breed of characters, Higgs tackles ‘The End of the Contender’ with a sympathetic approach. The political undertones of the track is carefully concealed, and it has been gaining regular rotation on BBC Radio 1.
‘Cold Reactor’ was also picked up by the station, which they had all but given up on receiving support from before Mountainhead. “We weren’t even getting Radio 6 anymore, and then suddenly, we had a Radio 1 hit, so that was bizarre, and made us feel like whatever happens with the album, we’ve already done something awesome with that single,” Higgs earnestly says.
Despite currently riding an impressive wave and already having six top-ten albums to their name, the primary focus of Everything Everything remains to earn a living. As much as they’d like to not work at such a prolific pace, hiatuses are a luxury afforded to a select few.
“We’re not big enough to, we can’t afford to (take a break),” he admits. “That’s the reality of it. People keep asking me why we keep making albums really quickly, and it’s because we’re not actually very popular. We can’t afford to take three years off like The 1975 or Vampire Weekend can disappear for five years because they’ve got loads of money and we haven’t.”
From the outside looking in, Everything Everything are a success by every old-fashioned metric. They have sold-out shows in the calendar across the United Kingdom, including at the 3,000-capacity Troxy in London. Still, Higgs says, “It can be quite hard to stay afloat at times”, which were “compounded” by the consequences of Brexit and the pandemic.
Without the ability to spend months working on an individual song, for Mountainhead, Higgs would complete the lyrics to each song on the same day he began the process. Initially, this was born out of necessity while working remotely during the pandemic on Raw Data Feel and Everything Everything quickly realised “we were actually pretty good at writing quickly”.
Raw Data Feel used an artificial intelligence bot called Kevin to assist with the songwriting, pulling in text from LinkedIn to 4Chan. Although it only contributed to a small portion of the lyrics, Higgs believes AI could already be responsible for creating hits, and he worries for new bands who now have to fight against the power of technology alongside the many other obstacles in their way.
“I would worry if I was somebody starting out because to try and get heard among the amount of noise there is already is extremely difficult now; there are hundreds of thousands of songs going on Spotify every day that are generated, in the hope that just one of those is a hit for the person that made it,” the singer frighteningly says.
“I could, for example, use an AI to write an amazing song, and then I learn the song and sing it myself. Everyone would think It was great, and there you go. Did AI write the song? Yes, it did, but no one will ever know, not that I’d do that because it’s not very fun, but people will be doing that,” Higgs adds.
If Higgs’ assertion about AI is proven correct, then the humanity at the beating heart of what makes music special is also at risk. Although the future looks bleak through dystopian-tinted lenses, the frightening absurdity of modern life can also provide powerful songwriting ammunition, as Everything Everything prove on Mountainhead.
Mountainhead is out now via BMG.
