Everyday Is Christmas (album)

Sia confirmed the release of her first Christmas album on 1 August 2017. The album was her first release through Atlantic Records and features original songs co-written and co-produced by longtime collaborator Greg Kurstin,[2] who worked on Sia's previous three studio albums: We Are Born (2010), 1000 Forms of Fear (2014) and This Is Acting (2016).[3][4] Kurstin also produced the entire album.[5] Everyday Is Christmas was released through Sia's own record label, Monkey Puzzle, and via Inertia in Australia.[6] Sia's frequent dance collaborator, Maddie Ziegler, is featured on the cover.[7] Recording sessions for the album took place over two weeks in May 2017 and left Sia and Kurstin "laughing at the end of each day". In September, Kurstin said of working on the album with Sia:

I don't know how she comes up with song lyric and melody ideas so quickly. ... [S]he wrote these new Christmas stories. ... I'm still sort of new at this Christmas thing. ... [It] took me back to when we used to get into jazz chord changes. There's some really fun uptempo Christmas jams, and then there's also some Sia ballads.[8]

The standard version of the album consists of ten songs;[9][10] in Japan, an exclusive domestic bonus track titled "My Old Santa Claus" was included on the CD.[11] The song was later included on the deluxe edition of the album, released in November 2018, alongside "Sing for My Life" and a cover of Perry Como's "Round and Round". In the United States, the deluxe was released as a Target exclusive.[12]

The lead single, "Santa's Coming for Us", was released on 30 October 2017, along with the pre-order of the album.[13] A music video of the song was released on 22 November, which stars Kristen Bell hosting a Christmas party.[14] The song reached a peak position of number 9 on Billboard's Holiday Digital Song Sales chart,[15] number 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart,[16] and 51 on the Holiday Top 100.[17] It peaked at 39 in the United Kingdom and debuted at 70 in Scotland.[18]

"Snowman", released on 9 November 2017, reached a peak position of 3 in the Holiday Digital Song Sales chart.[19] Additional songs also charted on the Holiday Digital Song Sales chart, with "Candy Cane Lane" peaking at 13 and "Everyday Is Christmas" peaking at 28.[20] Sia appeared on Ellen (with Maddie Ziegler)[21] and on The Voice to perform "Snowman".[22]

The music video for "Snowman", directed by Lior Molcho, premiered on 30 October 2020.[23]

Professional ratings

Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	59/100[24]
Review scores
Source	Rating
ABC News	[25]
AllMusic	[26]
The Guardian	[1]
Pitchfork	5.8/10[27]
Rolling Stone Australia	[28]
Slant Magazine	[29]

At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 59 based on 6 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[24]

Katherine St. Asaph of Pitchfork wrote that Everyday Is Christmas, as an album, feels "inconsistent and underwritten", comparing it to "opening a gift where someone’s forgotten to remove the tags". Asaph described the production as "vaguely festive" and criticised the positioning of "Snowman" next to "Snowflake" in the track listing, considering they both make use of the same metaphor.[27] Allan Raible of ABC News, however, praised the record, noting Sia designed the album for those "who are turned off" by the holiday classics.[25] Annabel Ross of Rolling Stone Australia wrote that, although Sia would have done a "fine job" interpreting the classics, with she and Kurstin crafting new, original songs, it was "hard to veer too far wrong" with them.[28]

The album debuted at number 27 on the Billboard 200, selling 19,000 album-equivalent units, while 15,000 of those were pure album sales.[30]

All tracks are written by Sia Furler and Greg Kurstin.

Credits adapted from the liner notes of Everyday Is Christmas.