Everything Everything

Mancunian quartet push the synths and guitars harder.

Over four albums, Everything Everything have gradually expanded their brainy art-funk into a sound that is more cinemascopic. For A Fever Dream, they’ve drafted in James Ford – a producer equally adept in the fields of electronics (Depeche Mode) and rock (Arctic Monkeys) – for their toughest record yet, peaking with the grinding guitars of Run The Numbers and the glitter-heeled glam stomp of Desire. Lyrically, singer Jonathan Higgs repeatedly takes the pulse of the world in socio-political terms and is disturbed by the results: Ivory Tower lambasts hateful, far-right Brexiteers; Big Game playground-taunts Trump with the words “Someone’s gonna pull your big trousers down and I think you might explode”. If Higgs’s head sometimes seems in danger of overheating, he acknowledges this in White Whale, desperately hoping that love might divert his thoughts from the “bad things”. Nonetheless, this is potent, frequently explosive stuff. Tom Doyle