Even as separate descriptive terms, ‘indie’, ‘rock’ and, by proxy, ‘indie rock’ carry a wide spectrum of ideas, sounds, styles and approaches to creating music. In their time together, Everything Everything have managed to traverse a substantial portion of what those terms have to offer. This is a band that hyperactively blends glitchy electronica, twinkling guitar and thick layers of vocals running through a blood-rush of tribal rhythms. When it comes to the creative side of Everything Everything, it’s become paramount that they continue to boldly go where no band has gone before – and not trip over themselves in the process.
“If we find ourselves repeating things, we tend to call one another out on it pretty quickly,” says Jonathan Higgs, the band’s lead vocalist, guitarist and primary lyricist. “There are some things that we’ve come to accept aren’t changing – the way I sing, for instance, is the way I sing, and Alex [Robertshaw] is always going to play guitar in his own way. It’s always going to sound like us – and so it should – but we’re pretty conscious about making sure what we’re doing hasn’t been done by us previously.”
After a year mostly spent away from touring, the Englishmen have re-emerged in 2015 with the imminent release of their third studio album, Get To Heaven. Enlisting the help of notable British producer Stuart Price, the band revelled in the chance to once again redefine what an Everything Everything song could sound like.
“This time around, we were very open in our dialogue about what we wanted to do,” Higgs says. “We wanted to make an album that was much more aggressive, much more high-energy and more confrontational than the last one. We all found that the second record [2013’s Arc], when we were playing it live, felt a bit too grand and a bit too negative. We wanted to make something a lot more colourful. A lot of the year that we spent writing saw us obsessing over the media and the violence and disaster in the world. We felt all-consumed by the news feed. This album was kind of a push against that.”
This brings us to the album’s somewhat ambiguous and open-ended title. The religious connotations present themselves, but then again, so do more sinister ideas. What can be taken away from a name like Get To Heaven? The answer is whatever you make of it – as you’re probably right.
“We got to the end of the record and we had this quite violent, bloodthirsty concept for the album title,” explains Higgs. “We must have gone through 50 titles – ‘blood’ this, ‘teeth’ that. After a while, I could tell the other guys weren’t happy – there was something missing. I was looking through the lyrics, and I went over the song called ‘Get To Heaven’. It immediately clicked – I was just like, ‘Fuck it, why not?’ It felt so positive, but it also had this underlying subtext of religious extremism. It feels like everyone is trying to get to what they perceive as their own idea of heaven, and you’ve got to take the good and the bad with that.”
Everything Everything have often relayed abstract metaphor and odd lyrical imagery within the confines of their music. ‘Torso Of The Week’, a song from Arc, mentions Twitter and treadmills, while recent single ‘Distant Past’ namechecks Italian rivers and biblical lands. Although Higgs appreciates that his approach to lyric writing may come across as bizarre or deliberately obtuse, he’s also quick to point out that in doing so, he’s allowing for the band to further stand out.
“I think it’s important in terms of being a successful band, but I don’t really know any other way when I write,” he says. “I find a lot of things cliché and boring – an awful lot of things, actually. I’m always striving to find things that aren’t the same old shit, basically. I’m after new angles. It’s slowly grown from being slightly obtuse to being exclusively about humanity through the avenues that I opened up when I first started the band. At this point, I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m not referring to a historical figure or a particular technology – it’s ostensibly traced back to feelings and human emotion.”
Touring is already underway for Get To Heaven, which is set for release this week. July will see Everything Everything return to Australia almost exactly two years after their maiden voyage, once again taking the stage at the Splendour In The Grass festival.
“We’re really excited to be coming back,” Higgs says. “The two headlining shows we’re doing around the festival should be a lot of fun, too. It’ll give us a chance to explore a little bit more, which we haven’t really had the chance to do before. Splendour was absolutely awesome last time. We were just blown away by it, to be honest. It was a country where we’d never been, and had absolutely no idea what to expect. We walked out onstage and there were all these people that were singing our songs. We had no idea what was going on!”
Everything Everything play Splendour In The Grass at North Byron Parklands on Friday July 24 – Sunday July 26. They also appear at the Metro Theatre on Thursday July 23. Get To Heaven is out Friday June 12 through Sony.
