The British art-pop band takes on the excesses of the old schlawin capitalism.
A new album from Everything Everything is always the answer to the question of what vision of the future the indie inventors from Manchester have come up with this time. Hardly any band takes a sharper look when it comes to the abysses that technological progress sometimes leads to (including an internet troll president like Donald Trump or the job market blessings of AI) and, in the worst case scenario, can still lead.
On MOUNTAINHEAD it’s a kind of heightened form of a hyper-capitalist society that doesn’t seem all that unfamiliar when you look at the enormous gap between rich and poor: Tireless digging at the bottom so that the mountain of money with its extremely rich summit elite continues to grow steadily while it’s over the people digging around are getting darker and darker.
Metaphorically, this may smell a bit like Karl Marx, but as a background and a source of friction, it develops a compelling bite. And yes, you can listen to these 14 art-pop numbers, polished to an electrified shine and always grooving in the best falsetto mood, even without interest in their dystopian superstructure. But it would be a shame for what Everything Everything has to say to us in it.