Everything Everything: ‘It was just going back to the grounding of what makes great pop music’

In conjunction with Sansar, the world’s leading virtual reality platform, this week the band have staged two online concerts for fans, complete with VR effects.

“I was thinking this year we’d be out and about in the world a bit; as we know...” sighs guitarist Alex Robertshaw. Nonetheless, he reports, singer Jonathan Higgs has been using his time productively, creating videos for four singles, while from his own perspective as the father of a young child, he says: “It’s been nice having time with her instead of being on the road.”

Re-Animator has been likened to the Manchester group’s debut album, Man Alive – however Robertshaw says the writing process was quite different. Back in 2010, he says it would be more cut-and-paste. “Sometimes when we’d be working on a song...we’d butcher a completely different piece of music and try to make it fit in. Sometimes that works, a lot of times it doesn’t. Sometimes when it doesn’t it still goes on the record because it’s interesting. This record we were trying to make everything stripped back so you could play it on just a guitar and the songs would work in any format.”

The guitarist talks about studying “loads of books on The Beatles, Radiohead or classical stuff” for pointers. “It was just going back to the grounding of what makes great pop music,” he says. “I spent a lot of time just trying to learn it all again. Essentially I just went back to what I was doing when I was 18 and trying to reignite old flames. Sometimes you go so far from your roots, but maybe that’s got us to a record that people need a little more of right now.”

Everything Everything spent a year prepping the songs at Robertshaw’s home studio before rattling through recording sessions with producer John Congleton in a fortnight. “Working that quickly meant we didn’t have a lot of time to perfect anything, so the playing on the record is exactly how it would sound if we just got together and played live once,” he says. “It’s got a few mistakes here and there, but it’s all part of the charm. It’s capturing a moment in time, rather than a perfected pop thing.”

Higgs has also talked about recapturing a sense of ‘wonderment’ – something of a challenge, perhaps, for a band who are over a decade into their career. “I think every record I personally try to push us in a direction that’s new, so I feel like we’re learning something,” says Robertshaw. “This one was about trying to prove the songwriting in the most basic possible way, to work on a few changes and do some interesting stuff. It’s not necessarily obvious when you listen, but it’s there in the writing.

“And we were trying to make things seem easy. There are a couple of tracks in there that are in different key signatures to what we would normally do, we were just trying to write them so they don’t feel awkward. It was about trying to make things have some complexity to them but feel natural. It’s a pretty hard skill.”

Many of Higgs’s lyrics were inspired by psychologist Julian Jaynes’ 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Robertshaw says: “Early on in the process he sent us an email saying, ‘I’m really interested in this and this is what I want to write about’. Sometimes it goes over my head, be honest, but it is an interesting subject. I like it when Jon is enthusiastic about something, it just means he’s going to put everything into it.”

Where the band’s last two albums were clouded by the politics of the times, in Re-Animator the focus is on the human condition. “I think Jon felt he’d been there for a long time; ever since Man Alive that had been the subject matter for Jon,” Robertshaw says. “I think maybe it was time to change things up a little bit. That was a positive change from Jon, trying not to get bogged down. Also I think there’s a general feeling that everything’s so bad, to add to that chorus was not a good thing. It’s better to write something hopeful. That’s where the title came from, trying to rejuvenate the band, to put a positive spin on life rather than talk about how bad everything is.”

Re-Animator is the first album that Everything Everything have made since leaving major label RCA. With a new home at indie imprint AWAL, Robertshaw says it feels like a fresh start for the band, who met as students.

“We were treating this record as like a new beginning for us. With Jon’s lyrics and how I approached writing with Jon, it was always going to feel like a fresh step. We moved to a different label, a different way of working with them and having a new team. I think it’s all added to a feeling of a fresh start.”

Re-Animator is out on Friday September 11. Everything Everything play at O2 Academy Leeds on March 19, 2021.