Everything Everything return with new single 'In Birdsong'
Everything Everything have released their first new single in two years – listen to ‘In Birdsong’ below.
The track is the first new music from the band since the release of their ‘A Deeper Sea’ EP in 2018, and comes after they teased a comeback earlier in the week, posting a blurry video of a sunny sky and the sound of birds tweeting to social media.
Produced by John Congleton, ‘In Birdsong’ extends Everything Everything’s penchant for “unorthodox sonic exploration, with rich synth textures, Jonathan Higgs’ impassioned falsetto and a pulse-like rhythm contributing to its escalating wall-of-sound,” a press release for the song reads.
Speaking about the new song, frontman Johnathan Higgs said: “‘In Birdsong’ tries to imagine what it would have been like to have been the first self-aware human.
“I had come across a concept by psychology academic Julian Jaynes, the Bicameral Mind Theory: the idea that at one stage humans had two separate minds, one inside each half of our brains, and messages or commands would be delivered by one and received by the other. These ‘voices’ were thought to be those of the divine. The theory claims that the eventual melding of these two minds into the two-sided human brain we have now was the dawn of mankind’s consciousness.”
He continued: “I wanted to somehow insert this evolutionary psychology into a song because I felt so in awe of the idea. I found a deep sense of wonder at its core, about life and the world. It applies to songs about love, sex, life, death and humanity – the things I’ve always written about.
“We weren’t intending to share this song right now, but in the age of coronavirus, we wanted to be responsive to the changed landscape and ‘In Birdsong’ unexpectedly emerged as the most appropriate song to reappear with. Birdsong has accompanied human life since before we were even human, but in the recent century it has been obscured or pushed out of our lives. In the song I talk about hearing birdsong and knowing we are conscious and alive. With fewer cars and planes, and less human intervention generally, we’ve all been given the opportunity to reconnect with resurgent nature, and where we all are, for this brief moment – In Birdsong.”
Earlier today (April 23), Sigur Rós frontman Jónsi shared his first new solo music in a decade with the crystalline single and video for ‘Exhale’.
Having been teasing new material across the last month, Jónsi dropped the first taster of the follow-up to his acclaimed 2010 solo debut ‘Go’.
Co-produced by PC Music’s A.G. Cook, ‘Exhale’ sees the Icelandic art-rock veteran sing of “letting go” and drifting off in the face of inevitable adversity. It comes with a choreographed new video directed by Jónsi and Giovanni Ribisi.
