Everything Everything is, if not an anomaly, then certainly something of a novelty. In an ever-changing music scene the band has managed to build up a dedicated following and have mastered the art of reinvention while remaining true to their own unique sound.
The Manchester-based quartet have come a long way from their early “Bizzare-n-B” sound, now playing sell-out performances, even if their gig at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre last night was cancelled. This latest tour follows their impressive fourth album, A Fever Dream, a contemplative investigation into the role of politics in our daily lives.
Speaking to The University Times, bassist and keyboard player Jeremy Pritchard discusses differences between the new album and previous outing Get to Heaven: “All the stuff on Get to Heaven came to pass, it all happened, it all became real and so this is more of an examination of the sort of human fallout from that.” Drummer Michael Spearman feels a similar way about the new record: “Get to Heaven feels like there was something about to happen, there was tension in the air as it were, now it’s things have happened like Brexit and Trump so this was kind of the emotional fallout from a personal perspective rather than global.”
Indeed, A Fever Dream’s eerie, delicate melodies feel like a distinct sidestep from the technicolor beats on Get to Heaven, which attracted attention for its catchy riffs and complex, hyper-political lyrics. This type of writing, Pritchard believes, will always be part of the band’s DNA: “I think that’s always going to be part of what we do and it’s certainly going to be part of where Jon [Higgs, lead singer and lyricist] comes from I think.” He adds that “the sort of scattergun delivery that’s so typical of what Jon does now, especially lyrically. I think that will always be part of his and our identity.”
It’s this recognisability that lead them to keep new track “Breadwinner” off the eventual tracklist for A Fever Dream, choosing instead to release it as part of a new EP, A Deeper Sea, to coincide with this month’s tour. Discussing the track, Pritchard says that “it had more in common with where we’d been before and that’s why we just didn’t feel it was consistent with the mood that we were really keen to maintain on A Fever Dream”. The track has the same urgent sound and aggressive vocals that characterised the Get to Heaven era.
“[Higgs] conceived it as a kind of big distorted bassline, Rage Against the Machine thing, and we kind of subverted that quite far in the end with [Producer of A Fever Dream] James Ford’s help in the studio”, says Pritchard. The song was accompanied by a new music video, presented to the band unannounced by Higgs. “I think even when Jon writes songs and lyrics he’s thinking visually a lot”, says Spearman.
The release of this EP was motivated as much by a desire to give fans new content as by an excess of recorded material though. In the past, the band have released each of their albums’ singles on vinyl, each with accompanying b-sides, along with a scattering of bonus tracks attached to each album. This time, however, they decided to hold off on releasing extra content. “We’re very deliberate about where a record begins and ends and what happens in the meantime and we didn’t want to sully that by sticking a load of like five extra tracks on it”, says Pritchard. This, however, left the band “conscious of the fact that that basically meant we’d put out half as much music and that in itself is maybe just not as preferable so it was nice to put some music out and it’s just good to put music out more frequently I think, especially these days.”
Last night’s gig in the Olympia Theatre was ultimately cancelled due to the snow, but looking to the upcoming tour as a whole – the band’s biggest headline tour to date – the band feels “sort of apprehensive” as Pritchard puts it. Spearman says that the size of the venues on this tour, which includes a show at the legendary Alexandra Palace in London, is “kind of indicative of our career in that we just slowly played bigger venues”.
It’s a difficult time for alternative and indie bands, with major names in the industry from Wild Beasts to the Maccabees calling it a day in recent years. “Culturally now it’s hard to remain relevant as a sort of traditional white guys with guitars group, because that’s just not the zeitgeist”, says Pritchard, “but that’s also the way it should be. The culture shifts around and it will revolve or not within our lifetime.” The band feels they’ve overcome these challenges by building up a steady following throughout their career: “I think by never really being that big in the first place, that’s helped. We’ve never gone backwards because we’ve never had that kind of spike and sort of ‘firework’ experience”.
This emphasis on the music has attracted no shortage of hardcore fans. Pritchard says that “the music endures because we put so much into it in the first place, so rather than having it kind of passing broad fascination from a sort of broader, more casual audience the people that come to the shows are so invested in it”. He adds that “when we play in America it’s like playing to a sort of Smiths’ audience or something because there are no rubberneckers there”.
Despite this heavy, calculated edge, the band’s music remains remarkably accessible. They’ve been described as “a Radiohead you can dance to” and this dancibility is an important part of the band’s identity. “It’s a shame to have the polemic get in the way of just sort of basic, physiological enjoyment. We still want people to be able to dance and for them to enjoy the melodies and stuff”, says Pritchard.
In an attempt to strike this balance between heaviness and levity, the band have worked with a number of producers throughout their career. Their last album was produced by James Ford, whose CV includes work with the Arctic Monkeys, Depeche Mode and Haim, and for 2015’s Get to Heaven they enlisted legendary pop producer Stuart Price. When discussing dream producers, however, the band places an emphasis on the personal connection, rather than professional experience.“It’s about the relationship really rather than the gravitas of the person in the room, although that will inevitably attract you to them in the first place”, says Pritchard.
This sense of connection is something the band has always felt with fellow genre-benders Foals. The bands have toured together a number of times, and it was on the latter band’s 2013 European tour that they were “in each other’s pockets”, as Pritchard says, “we would come off stage and go into their dressing room and they would go off stage and come into our dressing room, there was no real hierarchy, there was no sense of us and them and I think that was something that they found was a rare thing to experience on the road and it certainly is for us”. Additionally, the band found inspiration from their contemporaries. Spearman describes hearing early Foals single “Red Sox Pugie” on the radio as Everything Everything were being formed and “being really jealous that they’ve done that because I felt like that’s the sort of thing we should be doing and we haven’t done it yet”.
“They’ve done well coming from quite a weird post-rock background, which is great. But then to actually make that a kind of mainstream thing without feeling like they’ve sold out.”
If bands like Foals and Klaxons were the inspiration for Everything Everything, it’s likely that they will go on to inspire countless future artists. Their inimitable style, however, comes down in part to the vast array of influences they bring to their music. Their debut album owed as much to Destiny’s Child as it did to Nirvana, and more recent records have been inspired by artists as diverse as Kanye West and teenage grime outfit BGMedia. Spearman notes that this diversity comes through in their music: “We were rehearsing yesterday and we were playing [new song] “Put Me Together” and then we’d play an old one that was really heavy and I was just thinking it’s quite a broad palette.”
“I think we try and mine as much from ourselves as possible. It’s basically based around four people’s sort of journeys through music and there’s quite a lot to go on there.”
