Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt (Moby album)

In 2016 and 2017, Moby released two albums with his musical project Moby & The Pacific Void Choir, These Systems Are Failing and More Fast Songs About the Apocalypse, which largely tackled Moby's views on the 2016 United States presidential election and the national political climate.[3][4] By contrast, Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt marks a stylistic and thematic retreat from the explicitly political, punk rock-influenced Pacific Void Choir records.[3][5] Eschewing overtly political themes, the songs on Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt explore themes of spirituality, individuality, and humanity.[6] According to Moby, he "disengaged" himself from politics in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, and discussing the election's influence on the album, he said:

After the election, rather than blow my brains out or move to Denmark, I took a step back and said, "The common denominator to everything that's wrong is us, as a species." The subtext of the 20th century, and into the 21st century, is making egregiously terrible choices when we know better. The record itself is — rather than looking at systems and rather than looking at politics — looking at who we are as a species.[5]

Moby further pointed to the album's thematic concept of

The dialectic between light and dark, between hard and vulnerable — I feel like that’s the best description of who we are at this point. We’re super vulnerable and super dangerous at the same time. We burn through all our resources, we create all this misery, and the end result is we’re not very happy. This lunatic party that we’ve had for the last 100 years of burning and destroying everything would almost be excusable if we were really, really happy. The music on this record is looking at that."[5]

The title Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt is a reference to a line in Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five, one of Moby's favorite books; he was struck by the line's "utopian simplicity".[7] Two songs from the album, "Mere Anarchy" and "The Ceremony of Innocence", are named after lines from W. B. Yeats' 1919 poem "The Second Coming", which resonated with him as "a horrifying description of what we're going through".[5]

Moby produced Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt in his home studio.[7] The album draws from Moby's musical roots, incorporating influences from trip hop, dub, soul, and gospel music,[3][5][6] with a less "noisy" approach inspired by Moby's fascination with exploring the boundaries of studio production.[5] He has cited the record's biggest musical influences as being "the studio based albums around in the 70s and early 80s – Grace Jones, Marianne Faithfull's Broken English – pre-digital, where people would still use the studio like an instrument. Where they were playing around with synthesising and techniques but they were still working in the analogue realm".[1] Moby was also influenced by the production on certain post-punk, R&B, soul, and reggae records, particularly in their mixture of prominent vocals and experimental touches.[1] He aimed to incorporate "sonic imperfections" in producing the album's songs by utilizing older equipment.[5]

According to Sarah Bradbury of Clash, Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt finds Moby returning to his earlier "transcendental" electronica sound.[1] Steven J. Horowitz, in Billboard, describes the album as being driven by a "'90s trip-hop aesthetic",[3] while Neil Z. Yeung of AllMusic found it "mostly indebted to trip-hop and his pre-millennial output".[8] In Rolling Stone, Maura Johnston remarked that Everything applies the "Moby ideal of soulful vocals and big beats to the not-all-that-farfetched idea of a post-apocalyptic landscape", with Moby's "brittle muttering" providing a "downcast contrast to the more honeyed approach of his guest vocalists".[9]

On December 11, 2017, Moby announced Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt's title and release date, with the album also being made available for pre-order.[3][10] The album was released on March 2, 2018, through record labels Little Idiot and Mute Records.[3][10][11][12][13][14]

The first single from Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt, "Like a Motherless Child", was released on December 11, 2017, accompanying the announcement of the album.[10][15] It entered the Billboard Adult Alternative Songs chart, peaking at number 33 during the week of February 3, 2018.[16] The album's second single, "Mere Anarchy", was released on January 29, 2018.[17] "This Wild Darkness" was released as the album's third single on February 26, 2018.[18]

Professional ratings

Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
AnyDecentMusic?	7.0/10[19]
Metacritic	75/100[20]
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[8]
The Daily Telegraph	[21]
Evening Standard	[22]
The Independent	[23]
The Irish Times	[24]
Mixmag	6/10[25]
Mojo	[2]
Pitchfork	5.7/10[26]
Q	[27]
Rolling Stone	[9]

Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt received generally positive reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album has an average score of 75 based on 16 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[20] Ben Hogwood of musicOMH described the album's "instrumentation, beats, harmonies and tempo" as comparable to Moby's previous work, but found that the individual tracks' "greater resolve and authenticity" give the album "much more of a backbone".[28] Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph commended Moby's mastery of building tracks to "euphoric release" and concluded that "despite its relentlessly downbeat content, Moby's music is just too satisfying to be depressing".[21] Evening Standard's Elizabeth Aubrey felt that in returning to his musical roots, Moby had produced one of his "most accessible albums in years".[22] At Exclaim!, Luke Pearson praised the "well-crafted" record as "a tasteful and mature evolution" of Moby's sound.[29] Mike Schiller of PopMatters found that many of the mid-tempo songs could "slowly turn from a warm blanket into a test of endurance" with their "hazy and gauzy" production, but was nonetheless impressed by Moby's success in "turning despair and hopelessness into something engaging".[30] Louise Bruton of The Irish Times deemed the record "Moby's most personal album yet" and was compelled by the tracks' analysis of the "human condition and the awfulness that that can inflict".[24]

In a mixed review, Pitchfork's Sasha Geffen felt that Moby's vocals sound "anaemic" throughout the record due to the "circuitousness of his lyrics" and found the album minor compared to Moby's earlier works.[26] Ilana Kaplan of The Independent welcomed the inclusion of female vocals throughout the album, which she felt "speaks volumes in 2018", but wrote that the lyrics occasionally feel "overwrought" and "distract from his gorgeous soundscapes".[23] Spin's Annie Zaleski deemed the record to be a "let down—the equivalent of a sad, deflated Mylar balloon" compared to Moby's previous "buoyant" albums, despite its "glimmers of promise".[31] In The Times, Will Hodgkinson wrote that "those mourning the loss of 1990s trip-hop will have their prayers answered", but felt that the record is "rather portentous and, frankly, a bit boring".[32]

All tracks are written by Moby, except where noted.

Credits for Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt adapted from album liner notes.[33]

• Moby – production, recording, writing, vocals, mixing on "Welcome to Hard Times"
• Steve "Dub" Jones – mixing
• Apollo Jane – vocals on "Welcome to Hard Times", "This Wild Darkness" and "A Dark Cloud Is Coming"
• Mindy Jones – vocals on "Mere Anarchy", "The Waste of Suns", "The Last of Goodbyes", "The Tired and the Hurt" and "This Wild Darkness"
• Julie Mintz – vocals on "The Sorrow Tree" and "Falling Rain and Light"
• Brie O'Bannon – vocals on "This Wild Darkness"
• Raquel Rodriguez – vocals on "Like a Motherless Child"

• Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt at Discogs (list of releases)
• Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt at MusicBrainz (list of releases)