From left-to-right: Alex Robertshaw, Jonathan Higgs, Michael Spearman and Jeremy Pritchard
Everything Everything aren’t like most pop bands. They write lyrics about Photoshop and Fabergé eggs. Their music employs tricky rhythms and complex arrangements. Frontman Jonathan Higgs sings in an unmistakable falsetto. But turn on the radio and you’re likely to hear them on the airwaves alongside the likes of One Direction and David Guetta.
Over the course of three albums, the Manchester quartet have learned to balance their eccentricity with traditional pop sensibilities, and the result has landed them with prime-time radio slots and international festival appearances - yet they sound nothing like any of their peers.
They made their intentions clear from the very beginning, when they celebrated the release of their synth-heavy debut album Man Alive in 2010 by playing the whole thing from front-to-back at London’s Union Chapel...accompanied by a full orchestra.
“Yeah, that was ambitious! Possibly a little too ambitious, but we’re glad we did it,” drummer Michael Spearman tells me. “Thankfully we had help from friends with the arranging of the music for orchestra but the organisation and rehearsal side of things was quite an undertaking.”
Musically eclectic
Their latest offering, Get To Heaven, might be their most definitive statement yet. It’s fun, intelligent and without doubt their most musically eclectic, drawing particular inspiration from Kanye West and electronic producer Jon Hopkins as well as R’n’B, house, afrobeat, krautrock and everything in between.
But they rarely have a specific sound in mind when they sit down to write a song. “It’s normally just the way things come out in the very early demo stages. Sometimes we’ll infuse a song or a section of a song with a different style to how it was originally conceived but that normally happens unconsciously. It’s very rare that we set out to combine genres together as that can sound quite ham-fisted.”
Embracing the digital age
Reviewing Get To Heaven in The Guardian, music critic Alexis Petridis drew parallels between the music and the digital age that we inhabit; the complex arrangements and dense instrumentation acting as a reflection of the “information overload of 24-hour rolling news and the vast attendant echo chamber of social media.”
Perhaps this is a consequence of their creative process, which regularly involves replacing the traditional band set-up with something more digital. “More often than not these days our songs start life on a laptop as opposed to a guitar or piano. The advantage of this is that we’re not limited by technique and the only real limit is our imaginations. Picking up a guitar or playing a keyboard or the drums normally leads to playing things that we are in some way conditioned to play by old habits, which can feel limiting.
“The only potential downside to computers can be the lack of parameters. Having a totally blank page and the freedom to make anything at all can create a sort of ‘choice paralysis’. Normally we impose some limits - a framework to work within.”
Preserving hi-res audio
It takes painstaking hours in a recording studio to produce music this adventurous and densely-layered, and so it comes as no surprise that they have a lot to say about the preservation of digital music quality. “There are so many opinions on this...Paul McCartney has said he doesn’t care how people consume his music as long as they like it, while Neil Young is such an advocate for hi-res audio that he’s developed his own personal audio player for it.
“I suppose our view is kind of in the middle. We want people to hear our music, so if they do so via a legitimate low-res stream - and, importantly, the quality doesn't bother them - then that's ok. On the other hand it is a bit frustrating when we've spent money, time and care recording, mixing and mastering our music and people listen to it through their phone speakers or on terrible headphones, meaning they're missing out on detail, subtlety and power by losing high and low frequencies. That's a shame.”
The past five years has seen Everything Everything climb from playing the pubs and clubs circuit in Manchester to playing a feature stage at Glastonbury Festival in-front of tens of thousands of fans. For all of the musical dexterity on show, Get To Heaven also seems to be a celebration of where they are at now; the perfect culmination of everything that was great about their last two albums. “Arc was calmer and more passive than Man Alive but the songs were perhaps stronger in terms of melody. On Get To Heaven we’ve strived for more energy and colour than Arc while hopefully retaining the strong sense of melody. We’re really proud of it.”
Everything Everything’s latest album Get To Heaven is out now. To see their upcoming tour dates, head to the band’s website.
