Everything Everything share ‘Enter The Mirror’ video and tell us about new album ‘Mountainhead’
Everything Everything have shared the video for their new single ‘Enter the Mirror’, on the day of the release of their new album ‘Mountainhead’. Watch it first on NME below, along with our interview with frontman Jonathan Higgs.
The Manchester art-rockers have previously shared the singles ‘Cold Reactor’, ‘The Mad Stone’ and ‘The End of the Contender’, and now, with their seventh album out and a UK headline tour starting next month, they have spoken to NME about the concept behind ‘Mountainhead’.
The album takes place in a world where humanity has come together to build a mountain by digging a pit at its foot, with the workforce – or ‘mountainheads’ – driven by a desire to one day reach the top of the mountain and gaze into the mythical mirror that sits at its peak. In the meantime, as they dig ever deeper into the earth, the mountainheads live in mortal fear of falling into the trap of a Goliath snake that slithers around the bottom of the pit.
The ‘Enter the Mirror’ video sees the mythical mirror made manifest, with the song’s protagonist, who is in the throes of suicidal thoughts, being portrayed by a marionette puppet, who finds solace in a friend that he initially dismisses as his mere reflection. You can watch the video above.
Check out our interview with Jonathan Higgs below, with the frontman discussing the inspiration for the album’s original concept, the legacy of Liz Truss, and, after their use of AI on previous album ‘Raw Data Feel’, how they feel differently now about the role of artificial intelligence in our society.
Hi Jon, ‘Enter the Mirror’ is a song that ends in a beautiful place, but it goes through darkness to get there, doesn’t it?
Higgs: “Yeah, the song is about a friend of mine who was going through a bit of a troubled time last year and there was a brief period where I was really worried about him, I thought something really bad might happen to him. He’s fine, but I wrote the song around that time, almost imagining what I would say to him if I did lose him. Then it mutates into quite a surreal thing about him going into a mirror and maybe me and him are the same, deep down. It is a platonic love song. It’s quite a serious song but presented in a laid-back way, because that’s what we like, and it’s also what he likes.”
The video features some amazing puppetry, which is becoming a bit of a dying art. How did that idea come about?
“We’d already filmed the bits with us in it, but we’d run out of time. So, we were thinking about the possibility of animation or animatronics, but we realised we don’t have the time or money. So, I thought, what about puppets, we’d never done puppetry before. We found this guy who makes his own, he’s very old school about it, and he brought a few of his puppets to the woods and we created a little story, where this guy comes alive, he’s looking for something, and he sees what looks like his friend, but when he gets up to it, it’s just a mirror image of himself, alone after all.
“Then, he sees the mirror again, and isn’t a mirror, it is someone else, and he goes through the mirror in a transformational moment in the song. And he’s with his mate and he’s dancing and happy. It’s really simple, but it’s quite moving. You’re not sure if he’s moved into the afterlife or what.”
The mythology of ‘Mountainhead’ involves a mirror, and this song very much revolves around a mirror. Is it the same mirror?
“They definitely are connected. At the top of the mountain in this world, there is a big mirror, and no-one really knows even if it’s up there or not, it’s kind of a myth. The idea is that going into it would be the ultimate ego-death – to see yourself and know yourself. No one knows what happens if you manage to achieve that. People have tried to describe it, several religions try to do it by meditation. So it’s like, maybe this is the ultimate pinnacle of existence – to either find your true self or lose your true self. ”
And the quest of just going on the journey to find out what the mirror will show you is itself the point.
“The fact that no one’s really sure if it’s there or not, it’s just a rumour.”
The mountain and the mountainheads seem to evoke the inexorable march of capitalism and the elite benefiting off the work of a population that just seems content with their role in things. Is that what you had in mind?
“Content with the promise that they’ll get up there eventually. Meanwhile, they have to live in a deeper and deeper hole. In order to keep growing the mountain, they have to keep going down.”
There also seems to be a theme on the album of the dislocated, dehumanised way that we all communicate online now. It’s making us unhappy, but we’re all bound into it and there’s nothing we can do.
“Absolutely, there’s definitely a focus on that. We’ve all gone through a period of not leaving the house, we were in a darkness. And it hasn’t stopped, it’s increasingly like that, we’re getting more isolated the more ‘connected’ we become. We all know it and we all know that there doesn’t seem to be any alternative. The feeling we get is, how can we possibly get out of this, there’s no alternative. A lot of people are carrying this around with them all their lives.”
So does that make us all mountainheads? And is the goal not to be a mountainhead?
“Well, that’s a good question, because I even say that I’m a mountainhead too at one point. You kind of have to be, unless you completely reject society. I don’t know what the goal is, I don’t know how to escape it. But I think my job is to observe and report. It’s like, this is going on, and this or that is probably going to happen soon – what do you think? What are you going to do about it? I don’t want to paint it definitively one way or the other, I just want to point at it and go, this is a bit weird, isn’t it. The best thing that can occur in art and in music is somebody saying, ‘I feel like you do’.”
Is there something that specifically triggered the mountainhead concept for you?
“We were reaching the absolute dregs of the Tories, and it had been embarrassing for so long, and then it became impossible to believe when Liz Truss appeared and robotically repeated the mantras about growing the economy with seemingly no plan at all, with that dead-eyed look. It just felt insane, so I just thought, I’m going to create a world where something ridiculous is going on, but everyone is doing it and no-one seems to be asking any questions about it.”
Your last album ‘Raw Data Feel’ made use of AI to create lyrics and artwork. In the two years since it came out, AI seems to have become a dominant force in our cultural conversation. Do you feel any differently about AI now?
“No, it’s just become much less of a cutting edge, exciting thing. It’s become very banal now, it’s being used in the most base, idiotic ways. This new wave of just filling the internet with noise and hoping that something gains traction is a really boring use for it. Trying to replace thought with artificial thought is pretty uncreative. But there is great stuff happening too, it’s being used to spot cancer, so that’s great. There’s no one sweeping statement to make about AI. But it’s here and it’s now, so let’s reckon with it.”
‘Mountainhead’ by Everything Everything is out now, with the band on tour throughout 2024. Visit here for tickets and more information.
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Max Pilley
NME
