Everything Everything will soon release their fifth full-length album Re-Animator, follow up to 2017’s A Fever Dream. Earlier this year, they released the gorgeously prophetic “In Birdsong” as well as the jaunty, tongue-in-cheek “Arch Enemy,” and now, they’ve returned with the incredible “Violent Sun,” an incendiary track on the nature of the inevitable and unpredictable. Frontman Jonathan Higgs explained the inspiration for the track for DORK magazine earlier this week:
“‘Violent Sun’ is about the feeling that something terrible is approaching fast, and you want to hold on to this moment forever. It’s the last song of the night, and the last song of your life. You only have these four minutes to make it happen, so make it happen!”
Within the track, there’s an essence of pure, inconsolable panic; nearly every line in the song begins with “and,” Higgs expertly tacking more and more onto a single line until it feels like a sensory overload, one that grows more addictive as the track lurches forward. It even begins in media res, almost as if we, as listeners, are arriving right at the moment where the world is entering an irrevocable apocalypse,“the tears and the venom and the plasma” already merging together – human and nature and alien are all becoming one amorphous mass. The constant percussion and choral-like synth makes it feel like a non-stop deep dive into pure catharsis, sinking deeper and deeper as the track lurches forward.
Higgs’s vocals are breathless, but focused, like a launched arrow not changing its course for anything – he insists: “And you know it has to happen tonight / and you feel it for the very first time / And she takes you in her violent arms / and you stare into the violent sun / and you know this will be gone in the morning.” Before you can take a second breath, the last lines close out the song abruptly, silence filtering in like a punch to the gut. They weren’t kidding – you really only get four minutes to make sense of it all, and four minutes only.
Re-Animator is out September 11.
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photo courtesy of artist
kid with a vinyl 