Everything Everything
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Everything Everything

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“If we find ourselves repeating things, we tend to call one another out on it pretty quickly,” says vocalist, guitarist and primary lyricist, Jonathan Higgs. “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 taking a year away from touring, Everything Everything will release their third studio album Get to Heaven in late June. Enlisting the help of UK pop producer Stuart Price (Pet Shop Boys, Kylie Minogue, Take That), the band revelled in the chance to once again redefine what an Everything Everything record could sound like.

“This time around, we were very open in our dialogue about what we wanted to do,” he 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 newsfeed. This album was kind of a push against that.”

Over the course of their career, the band have often unfurled abstract metaphors and odd lyrical imagery within the confines of their songs. Torso of the Week, taken from Arc, mentions Twitter and treadmills, while recent single Distant Past name checks Italian rivers and biblical lands. “I don’t really know any other way when I write,” says Higgs. “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.”

The global touring campaign behind Get to Heaven is already underway, which means the band will be at peak fitness by the time they arrive in Australia in July. It’ll be exactly two years since Everything Everything’s maiden voyage Down Under, and once again they’re hitting the Splendour in the Grass main stage.

“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 on stage, and there were all these people that were singing our songs. We had no idea what was going on.”

BY DAVID JAMES YOUNG