Everything Everything - Cold Reactor (Radio Date: 09-11-2023)

Renowned for their visionary fusion of dystopian ‘Black Mirror’-style concepts with songs which blur the boundaries of experimentation and art-pop accessibility, Everything Everything announce the release of their seventh studio album ‘Mountainhead’. Introduced by the lead single ‘Cold Reactor’, the album sees the band continue to hurtle their creative adventures into new realms. It’s an approach that has resulted in five Ivor Novello and two Mercury Prize nominations, a run of five consecutive Top 10 albums, and major headline shows including London’s Alexandra Palace.

‘Mountainhead’ dives deeper into Everything Everything’s singular ability to examine the myriad ways in which future tech threatens to plummet humankind into a sinkhole of existential crisis and fractured societies - but as ever with music that provides a final clarion call of hope as darkness threatens to descend. This time the concept is the ‘Mountainhead’, an alternate society in which those at the bottom of society’s ladder are forced to work relentlessly to keep its elite, at the mountain’s peak, elevated. While it’s an idea that looks to a nightmarish future, it’s full of engaging metaphors for our current existence, from capitalism and environmentalism to religion and celebrity worship.

Frontman Jonathan Higgs explains, “In another world, society has built an immense mountain. To make the mountain bigger, they must make the hole they live in deeper and deeper. All of society is built around the creation of the mountain, and a mountain religion dominates all thought. At the top of the mountain is rumoured to be a huge mirror that reflects endlessly recurring images of the self, and at the bottom of the pit is a giant golden snake that is the primal fear of all believers. A ‘Mountainhead’ is one who believes the mountain must grow no matter the cost, and no matter how terrible it is to dwell in the great pit. The taller the mountain, the deeper the hole.”

‘Mountainhead’ also continues Everything Everything’s exploration of the hopes and fears of the power of AI - something that they addressed years before it became a dominant cultural conversation. That was particularly fully realised in their previous record, ‘Raw Data Feel’, for which they created an AI program and fed it selected information – the entire terms and conditions of LinkedIn, the ancient epic poem Beowulf, 400,000 4Chan forum posts and the teachings of Confucius – into AI automation processes and used its responses as a basis for the record’s lyrics, song titles and artwork creation. The band’s previous albums have also seen Jonathan Higgs’ continuously curious mind draw inspiration from other substantial concepts, such as Julian Jaynes's theory of bicameral mentality for 2020’s ‘Re-Animator’.

‘Mountainhead’ was produced by Kaines and Tom AD during sessions primarily at Eve Studios in Stockport and Ludwick House in Shropshire.

The lead single ‘Cold Reactor’ finds the band pushing their indie-pop heart to the further limits of abstraction, with gossamer vocal samples, a whirling galaxy of synths and breezy, left-of-centre melodies all part of its intoxicatingly off-kilter ambience. Lyrically it channels the growing futility of existence of those at the bottom of the mountain: not only for their thankless, all-consuming work but with their emotional expression powered by binary code.

Jonathan adds,“‘Cold Reactor’ is about striving for an advanced future and exponential growth at the cost of our own personal worlds and mental wellbeing. Lives lived through screens and isolation, leading to disconnected and emotionless reactions in the form of symbols.”

In keeping with the album’s dominant theme, the track arrives alongside an official music video, co-directed by long-time collaborator Kit Monteith and Higgs, in which the band assumes all-yellow worker outfits while summiting a mountain and subsequently tearing it apart, shard-by-shard.