Not many songwriters are worthy of the publication of a book solely of their lyrics. Unhitched from the music, plenty of couplets can lose their sparkle. Caps Lock On, however, which arrives on the same day as this sixth album from Manchester art rockers Everything Everything, promises to be a riveting read. Frontman Jonathan Higgs has consistently been in possession of the right image to skewer the surreal warp speed anxiety of the internet age, whether he’s reassuring his fanbase that “It’s all right to feel like a fat child in a pushchair,” or addressing Donald Trump directly: “Someone’s gonna burst your blood-blubber head… Someone’s gonna pull your big trousers down.”
This time he had some help from an unusual source: a computer developed by Mark Hanslip, a doctoral researcher at the University of York Contemporary Music Research Centre, which used artificial intelligence to spew out potential lyrics from the vast quantity of text that Higgs fed it. Though the frontman says he only ended up using five per cent of the results, including the song title Software Greatman, the machine’s diet gives some idea of the album’s preoccupations: Confucius and Beowulf, but also the complete Terms & Conditions of LinkedIn and hundreds of thousands of comments harvested from messageboard cesspit 4chan.
