Everything Everything

Hexham, Salford, and a band assembled from two places

Everything Everything came together in Salford in late 2007, out of two separate sets of friendships. Jonathan Higgs, Michael Spearman and the band's first guitarist, Alex Niven, had known each other at Queen Elizabeth High School in Hexham, Northumberland. Higgs met the bassist Jeremy Pritchard while both were studying at Salford University, and the band was formed after they graduated. Niven left in 2009 and was replaced by Alex Robertshaw, who has been the guitarist and, increasingly, the band's in-house producer ever since.

That line-up — Higgs on lead vocals, keyboards and guitar, Robertshaw on lead guitar and keyboards, Pritchard on bass and keyboards, Spearman on drums, with all three of the others singing — has now held for seventeen years without a change. It is an unusually stable spine for a band whose music has never sat still, and it explains a lot about how the current shows are built: four people who have played these parts together for long enough to take them apart on stage.

Man Alive, Arc and the record that keeps coming back

The debut, Man Alive, arrived in 2010 on Geffen in the UK and reached number 17. It was nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2011, which put the band in front of an audience that had mostly encountered them as a curiosity — falsetto vocals, lyrics stacked past the point of comfort, time signatures that refused to settle. Arc followed in 2013 and went to number 5, a cleaner and more direct record that traded some of the debut's density for melody.

Get to Heaven, the third album, came out in 2015 and reached number 7. It was written in the aftermath of a stretch of news that ran from Islamic State to the rise of the European hard right, and it did not attempt to be even-handed about any of it. Higgs has since described what he was hearing at the time as something that felt fringe and new, and which he would now call the alt-right — the difference being that it is no longer fringe. That gap between how the record read in 2015 and how it reads now is the reason the band have spent two years touring it rather than retiring it.

The middle run: dread, isolation, and a machine that writes

A Fever Dream, in 2017, went to number 5 and earned a second Mercury nomination in 2018. Re-Animator, in 2020, also reached number 5 and drew on the bicameral mind — the theory that human consciousness is a recent development and that people once heard their own thoughts as external voices. Raw Data Feel, in 2022, remains their highest-charting album at number 4, and was written partly with text generated from sources the band fed into a machine-learning model, including LinkedIn business correspondence and a fourteenth-century Norse epic.

Across that run the band moved from Geffen to RCA Victor, then to their own Infinity Industries imprint through AWAL, and then to BMG. They have collected five Ivor Novello nominations, and won Album of the Year at the Music Producers Guild Awards in 2019 — a producer's prize, which fits a band whose guitarist has ended up behind the desk.

Mountainhead

The seventh album, Mountainhead, was released on 1 March 2024 through BMG, produced by Tom A.D. Fuller with Robertshaw, and entered the UK chart at number 9. It holds a Metacritic score of 82. The conceit is a society that digs a pit in order to pile up a mountain, so that the people at the summit stay elevated and the people at the bottom keep digging, with a mirror at the peak and a golden snake in the hole.

It was trailed by Cold Reactor on 26 October 2023 and The Mad Stone on 17 November 2023, with The End of the Contender following on 2 February 2024 and Canary arriving on 22 October 2024. Record Collector gave it five stars, Under the Radar 8.5 out of 10, The Line of Best Fit 8 out of 10, with DIY and MusicOMH both at four stars and Clash at seven. Two of those singles, Cold Reactor and The End of the Contender, have become fixtures of the live set even on nights otherwise given over to a ten-year-old album.

The anniversary that became the job

On 4 July 2025 the band reissued Get to Heaven as an expanded tenth-anniversary edition: 23 tracks, with twelve bonus cuts made up of B-sides and previously unreleased outtake demos, pressed as a numbered run of 3,500 double LPs in yellow and orange after a pink and purple variant sold out immediately. Their own line on the reissue was that the record feels more relevant than when it was made, as megalomaniacs, narcissists and zealots extend their reach.

The UK and Ireland tour followed in late 2025, opening at the Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow on 27 November and taking in Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham, Newcastle, Bristol, Birmingham and Dublin. It was the first time the band had played the album in full. At Aviva Studios in Manchester on 29 November 2025, with Lime Garden opening, they played for about an hour in yellow and grey, and came back for a second encore that included the tour's first outing for MY KZ, UR BF and a marriage proposal from the floor.

Speaking to NME on 10 July 2025, Higgs said the things that now stand out to him are displays of empathy or humility — old-fashioned virtues, and rare ones — and predicted that the band would come off the tour wanting to make Get to Heaven Part 2. No eighth album has been announced.

Where they stand in September 2026

The anniversary run carried into 2026 rather than ending. Australia came first — the band's fifth visit — starting in Perth on 12 April and moving through Adelaide on the 14th, Melbourne on the 16th, Brisbane on the 17th and Sydney on the 18th, with Hayden Thorpe, formerly of Wild Beasts, opening solo. Festival season brought shorter, broader sets, including Bearded Theory at Catton Hall on 24 May 2026, where the album-in-full format was dropped in favour of Cough Cough, Kemosabe, Pizza Boy, Hapsburg Lippp and Only as Good as My God.

On 9 July 2026 they played Castlefield Bowl in Manchester as guests of Johnny Marr, on the bill with The Clockworks, for a 45-minute set from 7.45pm that opened with To the Blade and closed on No Reptiles. Nine North American dates are now listed, running from the Aladdin Theater in Portland on 22 September through San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, Philadelphia, Washington, New York's Irving Plaza and Boston's Royale on 6 October.