Indie-rock band Everything Everything, known for their meandering, falsetto vocals and politicised satire, arrive at the Graduates Memorial Building (GMB) in early afternoon to speak to the University Philosophical Society (the Phil) after their headline show at the Olympia Theatre last night.
Upon entrance the band’s manager quips that the show was “the best they’ve ever played”, and though this may have been in jest, Everything Everything agree that there’s always a certain magic to playing in Dublin. The chamber is not packed out, but those who are present have a certain adoration in their eyes.
Though their latest album, A Fever Dream, has emerged from the obscurity of their earlier work, the band’s sound remains utterly unmistakable – sonically and lyrically. Jonathan Higgs, the group’s enigmatic frontman, tells us of his fondness for writing about the corruption and falsehoods that have permeated American culture, but says it scares him whenever he crosses the Atlantic and sees it for himself.
Higgs’s lyrics have often been directed at capitalists and suits, but he claims he has no particular agenda, that it’s simply what interests him: “I don’t think it’s important that we discuss these issues, but it would be sad if nobody did.” Higgs says he uses satire to be critical of both sides of any argument, using it as a license against personal hypocrisy.
Despite admitting to being influenced by alternative rock giants such as Radiohead, the band find inspiration in the underground scene and the strange noises emerging from the undergrowth: “We find these bands, let’s say in the smaller pubs of Croydon, and we take their sound.” This is greeted with laughter – the band are quick to insist that “we don’t rob it, we just take aspects of it and merge it with our sound, and by then it’s unrecognisable”. After discussing the long journey to their big stage performances of today, Higgs jokingly advises those aspiring musicians in the audience to “quit now”, before telling them to stick to their guns and their sound, and let nobody tell them they can’t do it.
The band are about to begin work on their fifth album and have already begun fleshing out ideas. I ask if there’s any particular producer they aspire to work with in the future, but Higgs tells me that they want to produce this next one entirely by themselves, more than on any of their former projects. Names like Godrich and Eno, however, are thrown around by the other members. Nominated in the past for prestigious awards in creativity such as the Mercury Prize and the Ivor Novello Awards, Everything Everything’s audacious, unique refinement of their craft has both kept them radio-relevant and helped them retain their status as cult heroes. Even better, they’re down-to-earth enough to stick around afterwards to sign autographs and shoot the breeze with their audience.
