Everything Everything

Three of the original band members are from Northumberland, England - Jonathan Higgs (lead vocals, keyboards, laptop and guitar) grew up in the border village of Gilsland while Michael Spearman (drums, vocals) and Alex Niven (guitars, vocals) are from Newbrough. The three met at Queen Elizabeth High School in Hexham where they played music together.[4][5] Higgs went on to study for a degree in Popular Music and Recording at Salford University, where he met Portsmouth-born bass player Jeremy Pritchard. Higgs and Pritchard decided to form a band once their degree had finished.[6][7] Initially they collaborated in the Salford-based math rock trio Modern Bison (with Higgs on drums, Pritchard on guitar and Sam Carswell on guitar and vocals), which released one album, I Could Have Had a Rustic Pagoda on unlabel in 2006.

Towards the end of 2006, Higgs and Niven devised plans to start a band "with a sort of Paul Morley-inspired, poptimist aesthetic".[8] Niven has described the band's naming process as follows: "The idea as I saw it was to try to take contemporary R&B pop music and fashion a vaguely Futurist project out of it, and between the two of us we chose the name Everything Everything, a détournement of sorts of an over-saturated media culture into something idealistic and expansive".[8] Ultimately the band took the name Everything Everything from the first two words of the Radiohead song "Everything In Its Right Place", the opening track to their album Kid A.[9] With the addition of Pritchard and Spearman, the band began performing in the autumn of 2007.[8] Pritchard recalls "we were initially more punky, with more guitars and no synths at all. It was easiest to play gigs like this and to get to grips with playing together. But the plan was always to expand the sound when we had the scope/could afford the gear!"[4]

Quickly gaining attention from the music industry, the band began working with producer David Kosten (Bat for Lashes, Faultline). Everything Everything released their first single "Suffragette Suffragette" on 1 December 2008[10] through XL Recordings offshoot Salvia as a limited 7" vinyl release only. This was later followed by the release of single "Photoshop Handsome", which saw the group incorporate synths in their sound for the first time, on 20 July 2009, available only as a limited 7" single.[11] In autumn 2009, the band then released "My Kz, Ur Bf" as another vinyl-only release, this time with the record label Young & Lost Club.[12] All three singles were released with accompanying music videos, with those for "Suffragette Suffragette" and "Photoshop Handsome" made entirely by the band themselves.[13]

At this point, Niven left the band to pursue a career in academia[8] and was replaced by Guernsey-born guitarist Alex Robertshaw, whose former band Operahouse had split up a few months previously.[14]

Everything Everything made the longlist of the BBC Sound of 2010 on 7 December 2009, a list created by Britain's tastemakers who vote for their favourite new artists.[15]

Not long after the nomination for BBC Sound of 2010, Everything Everything signed to the UK arm of Geffen Records before releasing the single "Schoolin'" on 10 June 2010[16] as a CD single, digital download and also as a 7" vinyl. The single became the first to make an impact on the charts, debuting at number 152.

The band's debut album Man Alive (produced by David Kosten) was released on 30 August 2010 and was preceded by a reissue of the single "My Kz, Ur Bf" on 23 August 2010, debuting on the UK Singles Chart at number 121. The album was then released a week later, debuting on the UK Albums Chart at number 17.

Man Alive received high critical praise from some reviewers, though others were critical. NME dubbed the band as "pop's new Picassos" and commented "there are three dirty words in indie right now: ambition, intellect and effort. Everything Everything don't just fit those terms, they pole-vault over them."[3] BBC Music hailed the band's "brilliance" and noted "this Manchester quartet flee from any identikit indie clique, throwing ever-changing, protean sonic shapes... EE are wilfully eccentric, and endlessly entertaining, but they know more than most how to craft a song, how to make an album. They know how to give it depth, light and dark, and they – crucially – know when to stop."[1] Drowned in Sound praised the band's "sheer, rampant confidence" and described the album as containing "some pretty spiffy stuff...this is a band going places – they know it, and we know it."[2] Writing in Pitchfork, Ian Cohen commented that the album was "proof that enthusiastic experimentation can't save your end product when the underlying elements are so incompatible and unappetizing" and criticized Higgs's "irritating voice".[17] On 19 July 2011 Man Alive was shortlisted for the 2011 Mercury Prize, although it lost out to PJ Harvey's Let England Shake.

In May 2011, Everything Everything performed at Radio 1's Big Weekend in Carlisle.[18] This was a gig close to home for Jonathan Higgs, who grew up in Gilsland only a few miles away. On 28 November 2011 (along with local Manchester musicians Badly Drawn Boy and I Am Kloot) Everything Everything performed as part of the Billie Butterfly charity concert, raising funds for American medical treatment for Billie Bainbridge, a local young girl diagnosed with a rare brain tumour.[19]

The band went on to support Snow Patrol in February 2012, and Muse in November and December.

In 2012, Everything Everything resumed work with David Kosten on sessions for their second album. The first single from the sessions was "Cough Cough", released on 28 August 2012: following which the band announced that their second album Arc would be released in early 2013. New material from this album was performed in a UK tour spanning 13 September to 26 October 2012.

Arc was released on 14 January 2013, and debuted at number 5 on the UK Albums Chart. Higgs noted that in comparison to the complexity of the songs on Man Alive, the songwriting on Arc was intended to be a simpler distillation of his ideas and a more direct expression of his emotion. In an interview with the New Statesman, he explained that the new album was "far more open. It's far less cluttered and far less difficult to work out what's going on or what I'm saying. I think we tried to straighten it out and make it less distracting and more solid and strong. There are fewer places to hide I think, so that's the main thing. It's clear now who's doing what. It took us a long time to be confident enough to do that."[20]

The album was hailed as "another tour de force"[21] by The Observer, although The Guardian was more sparing with praise - "Jerky opener Cough Cough may showcase them at their most self-consciously wacky, but The Peaks is at the opposite end of the spectrum, attempting the kind of stadium melancholia beloved of Elbow or Coldplay. Inevitably, Arc lacks coherence; it's the sound of a band working out who they want to be. Hopefully that'll be the band that combines both modes seamlessly, as they do on Kemosabe and Armourland, a sleek piece of robo-pop that links social breakdown with the emotional barriers we all put up.".[22]

NME regarded the album as "a leaner, more relatable beast than its predecessor... The self-conscious straining to be regarded as innovators and iconoclasts that occasionally muddled their debut is absent here: this is a record less bothered about surface than it is about feeling... Slowly but surely, they are progressing towards something extraordinary." The review also called attention to the album's themes of technology and human response: "Pop's young futurists have written an album about how terrifying the future is. The intertwined themes of technology and disconnection are prevalent through Arc."[23]

A third single from Arc – "Duet" – was released on 25 March 2013 on 7" vinyl.[24]

"Kemosabe" went on to be nominated as Best Contemporary Song at the 2014 Ivor Novello Awards, and to win UK Single of the Year at the Music Producers Guild Awards.

Higgs mid-performance at the Royal Albert Hall in London

On 17 February 2015, the band released the single "Distant Past" with Zane Lowe on BBC Radio 1 naming it the 'Hottest Record in the World'. The band's third studio album, Get to Heaven, was released on 22 June 2015.[25] BBC Entertainment reporter Mark Savage said: "Ebola, missing airplanes, beheadings, the rise of UKIP. They're not the usual topics for a top 40 chart act, but that's exactly what alt-pop band Everything Everything have been writing about over the past year [...] The lyrics were inspired when the Manchester band took a year off from touring, and Higgs started watching rolling news on a loop". Higgs told Savage, "After we'd finished the record, I read the lyrics back and I realised I'd written a horror bible".[26]

The video for the band's single 'Spring / Sun / Winter / Dread' was shared on 31 July 2015. The video sees the band's frontman Jonathan Higgs take over production. He said via a press release, "The song talks about seasons passing and getting older, so we wanted to concentrate on the Sun and make it into a kind of oppressive force – positive and life-giving but also burning and destructive. We used Ultra-Violet and Infra-Red cameras to get a look at the sun damage on our skin, and give everything an alien look. We shot in a quarry so we could have a clear horizon and a dry, hot, desert scene. Most of the sun effects were completed afterwards because we picked a rainy day to shoot, though we did spray everything silver in order to get some good light reflections and add to the heatproof/astronaut feel."[27]

On 2 September 2016, Everything Everything released the single "I Believe It Now" for BT Sport to use for Premier League shows. They also announced they were working on a fourth album, with Higgs commenting that its lyrics would "inevitably" be affected by Brexit.[28]

On 13 June 2017, Everything Everything announced their fourth album A Fever Dream by releasing the single "Can't Do".[29] The album was later released on 18 August 2017[30] to strong reviews, with The Guardian declaring "if pop culture continues on its dorky course, it will be only a matter of time before these nerds rule."[31] Marcy Donelson of AllMusic wrote: "A Fever Dream is confrontational, warped, emotionally and aurally high-contrast, and full of turmoil, but reliable in its infectiousness."[32] The album also received commercial success, peaking at number 5 on the UK Albums Chart.[33] Following the success of the album, the band went on tour in spring 2018.[34] Speaking to The Independent, Higgs says "The lyrics are definitely more personal here, [...] You can't always be talking about the bigger things, you sometimes need to talk about what's close to you."[35]

This album saw the band's second Mercury Prize nomination, this time in 2018.[36] They later won Album of the Year (2019) at the Music Producers Guild Awards.[37]

Then, on 27 February 2018, Everything Everything released the EP A Deeper Sea in advance of their upcoming tour.[38] The EP received positive reviews, with The Edge saying "[their] latest four-track EP shows them to be, as ever, finely attuned to the untidy rhythms of modern society."[39] and rating it 4/5 stars. The EP was prompted by Higgs reading "some shocking statistics on male suicide" and going on to write the first track, "The Mariana". The remainder of the EP consists of an unreleased track from A Fever Dream: "Breadwinner", a remix of "Ivory Tower" (from A Fever Dream) by Tom Vek, and a cover of "Don't Let It Bring You Down" by Neil Young that had been recorded in 2017 for Annie Mac's Radio 1 show.[40]

On 23 April 2020, the band released the single "In Birdsong" with a music video directed by Higgs.[41] Their fifth album Re-Animator was announced on 13 May 2020 alongside the single "Arch Enemy", which was released on 11 September 2020.[42] A music video for the single "Arch Enemy", directed by Higgs, was later released on 27 May 2020. On 18 June 2020, the band released a third single "Planets", with a music video directed again by Higgs. On 28 July 2020, the band released the fourth single "Violent Sun", again with a music video by Higgs.[43] The music video saw use of the band's damaged instruments from a recent fire that occurred in their studio lockup, with the description reading "We decided to use our destroyed instruments one last time before we threw them out, filming ourselves and each other. Violent Sun is about desperately holding on to the moment before it passes forever." On 15 December 2020, a music video directed by Kit Monteith and Jonathan Higgs for the track "Black Hyena" was released.