Everything Everything band's album set for August

Everything Everything recently unveiled new single ‘In Birdsong.’ It was launched with a striking self-animated visual.

Now, the band announce that their new album ‘Re-Animator’ will be released on August 21. It has been launched with the new single ‘Arch Enemy.’

‘Re-Animator’ follows 2017’s ‘A Fever Dream’, which debuted at #5 on the Official UK Albums Chart. It was nominated for the Mercury Prize as well as two Ivor Novello Awards, and the band celebrated by playing their biggest headline show to date at London’s Alexandra Palace.

The band’s approach to ‘Re-Animator’ was to streamline the creative process by focusing on harmonies and melodies over synths and programming. Inspiration came thick and fast: wonderment at the wider world despite the horror of its politics; existentialism and the prolonged, if fading, youthfulness of being in a touring band; and the ominous threat of climate change. All things which contribute to a sense of one door closing while another awaits.

Extensive reading shaped such ideas further, especially in regards to front-man Jonathan Higgs’ fascination with the eminent psychologist Julian Jaynes’ theory of the bicameral mind. It argues that early in human evolution, the two sides of the brain were next to each other but functioned independently. In essence, one side would hear the other sending instructions via a disembodied voice - a zombie-like state of pre-consciousness.

“This idea of the divided self captivated me,” said frontman Jonathan Higgs, about the album influences. Psychologist Julian Jaynes "attributes this to the origin of gods, people ascribing deity status to this voice they could hear in their head. All this blew my mind, and I started thinking of ways I could make this a central concept. It really touched me. So across the whole record there are millions or references to this theory – to having a split brain, two selves, hearing voices.”

The album emerged in two stages. A year of writing and demoing was followed by two weeks recording at RAK last December with producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Sharon Van Etten, David Byrne). He complemented the band’s back-to-basics nature by encouraging them to record quickly. 

Of ‘Arch Enemy,’ Higgs said that it "sees a modern-day protagonist searching for a meaningful God. Finding only a congregation of greed, toxicity and waste, in the form of a sentient fatberg in the sewer, he duly prays to it, willing it to purge the decadent world above that has created it. These growing grease mountains are a curious juxtaposition of the modern and the ancient; a brand new example of archaic squalor.”

‘Re-Animator’ is now available to pre-order on CD, vinyl, cassette and digital formats.

Track listing:

'Lost Powers’
‘Big Climb’
‘It Was A Monstering’
‘Planets’
‘Moonlight’
‘Arch Enemy’
‘Lord Of The Trapdoor’
‘Black Hyena’
‘In Birdsong’
‘The Actor’
‘Violent Sun’