Everything Everything talk about their latest sonic manifesto, A Fever Dream

A mere two years on from their chart-busting, critically acclaimed third album Get To Heaven, Mancunian genre-mashers Everything Everything unleash their latest sonic manifesto, A Fever Dream. A record which examines the current political climate and features some of their finest work to date, the band’s frontman Jon Higgs tells us that his aim this time around was to strike while the iron is hot.

“We gave ourselves a whole year to write Get To Heaven and that kinda drove everyone mad,” he laughs as we sit down for our chinwag.

“Personally speaking, it drove me completely insane. Not surprisingly, we didn’t really want to do that again! To be honest though, it doesn’t really feel like the time to be sat still.

“So many things have happened in the world and some of those were kind of what we were touching on with Get To Heaven; now is the time to keep talking. It feels like everyone should be making as much art as they can.”

While the lyrics on Get To Heaven were informed by the rise of Isis and UKIP, the subject matter for A Fever Dream tackles Brexit, or, more specifically, the aftermath of the infamous referendum.

“Brexit influenced the lyrics hugely. Rather than go into specific details, I wanted to talk about the effect that it’s had. You know, the fact that in the UK your neighbour is your enemy now and everybody mistrusts everyone else. There’s now division in everything you can possibly think of – marriage, age, class, race, wealth/poverty… It’s literally affected every single division of our society and split everything aside like it’s been fracked. So I wanted to talk about the aftermath of that rather than writing a load of songs and being like, ‘Oh this is terrible’ or ‘You guys are stupid.’

“I didn’t want to add another voice to the clamour that is life now. Everybody’s screaming and outraged and I wanted to get out of that and examine the bigger picture.”

Enlisting the production skills of Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford, who’s previously worked with Arctic Monkeys and Florence and the Machine, the four-piece decided to take a different approach to songwriting.

“The writing was much more shared this time. Me and Alex [Robertshaw, guitar] wrote almost all of it together in the same room, which was kinda new for us. We used to do it alone and then swap ideas but now we do it the old-fashioned way. It’s great, because you work really fast with immediate feedback. James Ford was brilliant, he has a really playful mind.”

Earlier this summer, Everything Everything took to the road to test out some of their new material and even squeezed in a secret slot at Glastonbury. In an era of inevitable leaks and copious phone footage, weren’t the band worried about fans uploading performances of unreleased material onto YouTube, we ask?

“You can’t stop it. We asked people not to record the new tracks when we played some small shows, but I’m sure people did. It’s really up to the fan, isn’t it? If you want to watch a slightly crappy video of us playing something we’re not very confident about, go for it. I don’t like doing that with music I really love, but I’m not going to knock someone who’s really into it.

Everything Everything shortly hit Electric Picnic, and Jon is fulling looking forward to returning to Ireland.

“We’re really excited for Electric Picnic,” he enthuses. “To be honest, I don’t have any Electric Picnic memories, because I’m really terrible with remembering shows unless I’ve had a really bad time! It’s always been a really good show in Ireland though, there’s great audiences there. We played Whelan’s in Dublin quite a few years ago now and it was just mayhem. There were people crowdsurfing during our quietest songs and that’s always stayed with me.”

A Fever Dream is out now. Read the review here.