Everything Everything
Mountainhead
BMG
As Everything Everything has kept at an upward climb, holes of their own creation have begun to dot their landscape. After breaking out with an opening trio of art rock records that deftly wove dense wordplay from vocalist Jonathan Higgs with bright, kinetic guitar work from Alex Robertshaw, something started shifting in the waters for the English quartet. Glimmers like “Put Me Together” or “Violent Sun” occasionally shone through on records like A Fever Dream and RE-ANIMATOR, but the band increasingly dug toward endeavors that sanded down what made them such a striking contrast to their 2010s alt-pop contemporaries. The lyricism grew less labyrinthine, the instrumentation closer to painting Radiohead influences in broad strokes. And then came Raw Data Feel’s defanged slurry of AI-assisted banalities in 2022.
It’s only fitting that the band’s most consistent record in years is, in part, about a precipitous climb of its own. Though Mountainhead’s conceptual framework—involving a mountain being eternally built at the cost of those staking their livelihood on digging into it to dwell inside—has been described by Higgs as a larger metaphor for relentless capitalistic pursuit to the detriment of human life, whatever overarching narrative exists mostly takes a backseat to a songs-first approach that better suits Everything Everything’s enduring strengths.
Opener “Wild Guess” marks a spectacular return to form on this front, bursting out of the gate with a triumphant gallop of a riff from Robertshaw. Higgs’ socioeconomic commentary is at its most playful here as well: “This is the most important thing you’ll ever buy from us,” he sings in a low rasp before Robertshaw breaks through with kaleidoscopic, cascading chords. Elsewhere, lead single “Cold Reactor” is the apotheosis of the kind of airtight songwriting Everything Everything can pen in their sleep by now. Higgs cartwheels through enjambed lyrical gymnastics and leaps into his trademark falsetto with ease, as layers of echoing synths and slide guitars subtly compound. And amid the self-mythologizing callbacks of “The Mad Stone” rests one of the band’s strongest uses of dynamics, the expansive, choral refrain arriving like a sudden avalanche swallowing the track whole.
Somewhere along the midpoint of the record, however, Mountainhead starts straining under its own weight. At nearly an hour—Everything Everything’s longest release to date—the album’s back half blurs amid interchangeable midtempo art-pop softballs. The tonal stagnation of these later tracks begins to wear, notably in the back-to-back of static pulsing synths on “Enter the Mirror” and the chintzy xylophone-backed “Your Money, My Summer.” On penultimate ballad “City Song,” Higgs foregoes his idiosyncratic lyricism for a simplified and thuddingly nondescript quatrain: “Oh, you are a woman / And I am a man / We live in the city / And we do what we can.” If there was ever a case for how compelling Higgs’ fantastical mode can be, this makes it.
As always, bright spots emerge in some of the deeper cuts—namely, “Dagger’s Edge” and the flurrying guitar break that slices through its climax. But Mountainhead illustrates the duality of Everything Everything’s current state better than ever: a band that can still scale great heights with intricacy and grace occasionally stretched thin by the formidable holes in their grand design.
