Everything Everything’s seventh studio album, Mountainhead (released today, 1st March 2024), is everything you’ve come to expect from the idiosyncratic northern art-rock outfit but clocks in too long.
Mountainhead is clever and obtuse, sonically diverse and thick; it gives the civilian something different to listen to, while enabling the diehard to freely mine its content for intellectual nuggets and previous album callbacks. Indeed, as a group, if Everything Everything are anything, it’s knowing. EE revel in having a rabid fanbase who’ll check their references and, as less than five minutes of scrolling Genius.com will highlight, will often start and reply to annotations of their lyrics.
The album’s opening track, ‘Wild Guess’, launches with a harmony that is almost immediately pitch-shifted and bent before being layered with a scuzzy guitar line. It’s driving and it’s likely going to be a break or opener in their live sets, and – if we are going to read into a band as well read as Everything Everything – tells us before Jonathan Higgs’ lyrics do that we are about to enter a world of manufactured disorder.
Mountainhead’s narrative is driven by a salesman who plumbs the depths of an allegorical society demarcated by their position on a mountain. They first spend time with workers who have surfaced from the mine they’re mindlessly digging to make the mountain they live under bigger (‘Cold Reactor’).
He’s quizzical about the workers’ habits – choosing to spend time either in the pit or in the supermarket – while understanding that even though it’s unspoken, they know “we’re just meat” (‘Canary’).
Next, the narrator appears in cahoots with a peak-dweller (‘Don’t Ask Me to Beg’), whose narcissistic aspirations to reach a mythical mirror atop the mountain are clearly aided by the labours of the working class (‘Enter the Mirror’): the more the underlings dig, the higher up the higher ups get.
And when the salesman crosses the threshold of what he thought was success, he simultaneously and immediately realises it’s not for him and that he can’t go back, confessing: “I’ve spent your money / all of the summer / God knows I wanna go home” (‘Your Money, My Summer’). You see, while both groups are dysfunctional and the peak-dwellers are goaded by their narcissism, the workers appear content in the darkness.
Equally, we might imagine the workers as music listeners, the salesman as the artist (clearly Everything Everything) and the peak-dwellers obsessed with the mirror as a faceless label fixated on an idealised version of artist success rather than the success of the artists they have: “Looking at another picture of a man who stood there looking at a picture of a man who stood there looking at a picture of a picture of a man who was the double of me” (‘The Mad Stone’).
Is this a frustration the band have having released their music across four different labels (Geffen, RCA Victor, AWAL and BMG)? When you’ve been operating at the peak of your powers for a while, enjoying critical success and growing a devoted fanbase, does there come a point when you don’t actually feel love from above?
While the band are rightfully revered for their audio eclecticism, there will surely come a point where iteration overwrites inception. That’s possibly the case on Mountainhead, which hits familiar notes in signature tones. ‘The Mad Stone’ features filigree talk-singing that melds the madness of Freddie Mercury with the effortless precision of Kendrick Lamar; ‘Don’t Ask Me to Beg’ opens with a snare and hat reminiscent of 2 Unlimited’s ‘Get Ready For This’ and carries on like LCD Soundsystem’s ‘Tribulations’; ‘Enter the Mirror’ is indie tropical house; ‘Dagger’s Edge’ thumps like the best of White Lies’ first album; the drumline in ‘R U Happy?’ could easily expand a UK garage playlist, and, if we are drawing comparisons, the big kick and heavy snare with the staccato guitar of ‘Your Money, My Summer’ is reminiscent of Arctic Monkeys’ ‘Fireside’ (from the same album as their rock stomper ‘R U Mine?’).
To be clear, thematically and rhythmically, from the soul-shaking sub-bass to the pumping and piercing polyrhythms, the album is interesting to listen to at every level. And while Higgs’ falsetto might be a marmite thing, if you love it, along with his rapidfire raconteuring – ‘The Mad Stone’ has a breathtaking bridge in it – he’s consistently operating at the height of his ability here.
Mountainhead’s breadth of sound and potential influence make for enjoyable listening but it’s not clear why the album continues after track 12. In ‘Dagger’s Edge’ the salesman’s arc seems to naturally conclude with the realisation that “we’ve all become tomorrow’s bacon / the customer’s always right”. Or maybe that line’s more instructive than we realise – was it a lack of discipline, the want to appeal to fans, or a need to appease the label to make the album a deluxe record from the start? As a point of reference, Get to Heaven (their seminal 2015 release, which still has the highest aggregated user rating on metacritic.com), initially launched at an electric 46-minutes before a deluxe edition added six more tracks; Mountainhead is significantly closer to the hour mark as standard.
In track 13, ‘City Song’, the narrator finds they’ve been forgotten: “I called up the office, said I’m not coming in / they didn’t know my name / I didn’t know my name”; in ‘The Witness’, the narrator describes seeing it all through a “shattering window”. Maybe these cuts were intended to reinforce the idea of lockdown explored earlier in the album; maybe the band felt they needed a device to place Mountainhead close to the dystopia presented in Get to Heaven. Both tracks feature narratives that occur away from the mountain, depicting depleted urbanites rather than myopic mountain folk, and in so doing arguably dilute the album’s otherwise tight concept.
Mountainhead’s salesman might be traced back to ‘Cough, Cough’ on the band’s 2013 sophomore album, Arc:
“Yeah you’re ravenous you’re chomping at the bit
Just a cog next to a cog next to a pit
I would burn to break away and rest my ears”
Where he identifies a constant need for new data that dehumanises the consumer; in ‘Cold Reactor’ it’s hoped that an emoji will communicate deep feelings of unease. In Mountainhead as a whole the salesman understands through experience that whether you’re mindless in the mine or faceless a mile high and away from it, both positions are regressed and purgatorial.
There might be something in the middle way – in appreciating what we have, working less and consuming less and importantly looking each other in the eye and not the screen – but the band know they too have to somehow make this vision palatable (sellable even), explicitly telling the listener on the first track that “this is the most important thing you’ll ever buy from us” (‘Wild Guess’). For a band seven albums in, there’s clearly, still, purposeful flesh on these bones as their parallel universe foretells and fears a living fallout that feels all too feasible. Despite the fat of the final two tracks, Everything Everything’s brio and braggadocio are entirely earned here: Mountainhead is pinnacle modern art-rock and, after Get to Heaven, could indeed be the best realised thing you buy from the band.
Words by Jack Mann
@CoachJackMann
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