First breaking through at the dawn of the 2010s, Manchester-formed art-rock outfit Everything Everything have always centred a kind of poptimism that set them apart from the rest of their mathy counterparts. While the rest of the pack busied themselves with sweat-drenched house parties and signature-shifting guitars, this four-piece felt more indebted to US new wave bands like Devo – early on they swapped jeans for matching boiler suits – and incorporated a dizzying range of reference points.
Their breakthrough 2009 single MY KZ UR BF was frontman Jonathan Higgs’ answer to an old-timey R’n’B song shot through a strange, syncopated lens and overlooked by the impending apocalypse. That eclectic approach has endured over a decade later. Their upcoming sixth album Raw Data Feel – out on May 22 – was partially written by an AI robot, which the band fed excerpts of Chinese philosophy, the old English epic poem Beowulf and comments from the controversial anonymous image-board site 4Chan.
