No-one quite operates in the realm of the visionary Everything Everything. Setting dystopian ‘Black Mirror’-style concepts to songs which thrillingly find the sweet spot between esoteric experimentation and art-pop accessibility, the band have earned critical acclaim and a devoted following in equal measure, leading to five Ivor Novello and two Mercury Prize nominations, a run of six consecutive Top 10 albums, and major headline shows including London’s Alexandra Palace. 

Everything Everything have always been ahead of the curve in terms of exploring future tech concepts years before they became a dominant cultural conversation. In the wake of their previous record, 2022’s ahead-of-the-curve ‘Raw Data Feel’ (which fed everything from 4Chan forum posts to the teachings of Confucius into an AI program, and using its responses as a basis for its lyrics and titles), vocalist/guitarist Jonathan Higgs spoke of a desire to take things back-to-basics. Jonathan and guitarist / producer Alex Robertshaw lead the band’s collaborative songwriting, which is completed with input from Jeremy Pritchard (bass, back from a sojourn with Foals) and Michael Spearman (drums). 

But while the creative process of making their upcoming seventh album, ‘Mountainhead’, was a relatively streamlined affair, the end result bursts with a wealth of sonic touches and conceptual themes which makes it feel anything but. And yet within this record, somehow simultaneously both immersively detailed and exuberantly escapist, Everything Everything have found a potion to beckon newcomers into their world. 

This time the concept is the ‘Mountainhead’, an alternate society in which those at the lowest rung of society’s ladder are forced to work relentlessly to keep its elite, at the mountain’s peak, elevated. While it’s an idea that looks to a nightmarish future, it’s full of engaging metaphors for our current existence, from capitalism and environmentalism to religion and celebrity worship. Jonathan explains it thus: 

“In another world, society has built an immense mountain. 

To make the mountain bigger, they must make the hole they live in deeper and deeper. All of society is built around the creation of the mountain, and a mountain religion dominates all thought. At the top of the mountain is rumoured to be a huge mirror that reflects endlessly recurring images of the self, and at the bottom of the pit is a giant golden snake that is the primal fear of all believers. A ‘Mountainhead’ is one who believes the mountain must grow no matter the cost, and no matter how terrible it is to dwell in the great pit. 

The taller the mountain, the deeper the hole.” 

The possessor of a continuously curious mind, Jonathan is a man who admits he can never quite switch-off – and therefore anything that ignites his imagination can evolve into his lyrics. The impetus, he notes, was Mark Fisher’s book ‘Capital Realism’ which was then heightened by Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget (although this is very much a big picture concept, rather than a specific allegory). Capitalism’s quest for

exponential growth prompted him to think: Would humanity be happier sitting around a campfire? Is this a path to a better future? Or is it a one-way-ticket to our own demise? 

“We’re becoming more isolated and lonelier and it’s in pursuit of something that’s so intangible and multifaceted that you can’t can’t really see the benefits of it in your real life,” notes Jonathan, his tone suggesting that the answers to the questions he poses are eternally out of reach. “From The Industrial Revolution or even some point before we stopped being in tune with the world, and everything we do that makes things better leads to us living lonelier and stranger lives.” 

Yet while the songs on ‘Mountainhead’ can engage the mind, you don’t need to be locked into Jonathan’s philosophising to lose yourself within its world. For such a considered record, it simmers with emotion, particularly within the closing song ‘The Witness’. It references a childhood incident in which Jonathan compulsively picked up an air rifle and shot a bird, and the regret, horror and visceral awareness of death that instantly followed – all mixed with imagining witnessing a similarly transcendently terrifying event happening to a loved one. He credits Alex with unlocking the maelstrom of sounds that bring the song, and indeed album, to a dramatic crescendo but still can’t bring himself to revisit the emotions that it so palpably conveys. 

Alex shares a similarly obsessive creative streak to Jonathan, yet his focus is on manipulating sounds in a way that makes Everything Everything so satisfyingly off-kilter from the indie/alternative pack. As co-producer with Tom A.D. Fuller under their shared pseudonym Kaines & Tom AD, Alex set himself a simple if daunting challenge for this record: “How can I do something interesting with something that’s been done a million times before?” His answer was to focus upon manipulating live takes without resorting to using any plug-ins on the album at all. 

“Those simple ideas sometimes work better than layering lots of really complex effects on top of each other,” he states. And in ‘Enter The Mirror’ and ‘Your Money, My Summer’ the result is two streamlined tracks which place Everything Everything’s distinctive character more firmly in the alt-pop world than ever before, inspired in part, by the woozy, drug-tinged sound of ‘Imagine This Is A High Dimensionsional Space of All Possibilities’ by James Holden. While Jonathan agrees that “the song has to work, and then you can have fun with bells and whistles,” there is a kaleidoscopic array of inventive flourishes and influences at play throughout the record. See the Laurie Anderson-inspired strings that pulsate in a staccato rush through ‘The Mad Stone’ or the more sweeping orchestration that underlines Jonathan’s falsetto in ‘TV Dog’. Meanwhile, ‘Don’t Ask Me To Beg’ plays out like Soul II Soul or Massive Attack in the midst of a panic attack. 

For all its subsequent accessibility, ‘Mountainhead’ opens in audacious style with ‘Wild Guess’. A detuned / pitchshifted drone (actually Alex’s voice filtered through a synth) introduces the record, an experiment in which Alex found a way of “really abusing the MIDI capabilities of Ableton” to bend notes, before a broken guitar solo taken directly from a backstage demo recording leads us deeper down the ‘Mountainhead’ path. It still tickles Alex: “It just sounds ridiculous, but I like the fact that the record starts with something as outrageous as that.”

Always striving to direct every element of their creative universe, Everything Everything teamed up with long-term visual collaborator Kit Monteith to film all of the album’s accompanying videos. They were completed in particularly challenging circumstances: everything was shot in just a week with the already gloomy weather of autumnal Wales by the battering bluster of Storm Agnes. 

A new album is inevitably a time of reflection for bands, and Everything Everything remain open-minded as to their place in the broader landscape. Jonathan asserts that reaching stadiums is still his ultimate goal, but he can see the challenges in getting there. “I feel like we should be aware that at this stage in our career that there are still people who don’t know who we are. We’ve got a lot of history and interconnected lore, and all that stuff makes our very dedicated fan base very happy, but it might be a bit intimidating to new people. So to try to present ourselves in an accessible way, not necessarily musically, is a good idea. If we can be exposed to some new audiences, that would be pretty good.” 

And that’s the heart of ‘Mountainhead’. Its concept offers plenty for fans to lose themselves within and investigate in-depth, but if you take these songs for their pure sensory experience there’s plenty to love. It’s so rich with leftfield production ideas and genre-colliding that fans of niche artists can adore it, but the songs are also instantly inviting to people who haven’t yet fallen under their spell. With ‘Mountainhead’, Everything Everything have opened a world of new possibilities without losing any of the essence of their identity.