Get to Heaven
Get to Heaven is the third studio album by British band Everything Everything. Recorded primarily in Angelic Studios in Northampton during the latter half of 2014 with producer Stuart Price, it was released on 22 June 2015 on RCA Records. A deluxe edition, featuring an additional six tracks, was released simultaneously. It peaked at number seven on the United Kingdom Albums Chart, also charting in Australia and Ireland. The tracks "Distant Past", "Regret", "Spring / Sun / Winter / Dread", and "No Reptiles" were released as singles throughout 2015.
The album's lyrical themes are dark, focusing on global tensions and political happenings during 2014. The rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, media coverage of the 2015 general election in the United Kingdom, and various mass shootings influenced its writing. The upbeat sound of the music was composed to provide contradiction to the violent subject matter, and is inspired by artists such as Radiohead, Suicide, and Kendrick Lamar. As with previous Everything Everything work, most of the songs are presented as in-character narrations.
Get to Heaven was well received by critics, with most reviewers noting the effectiveness of the album's message; others commented on its bold, aggressive nature, with some labelling the tone "overwhelming". It was at one point touted as a favourite to win the 2015 Mercury Prize, but was not ultimately shortlisted for the award.
Recording and production
Initial work on Get to Heaven was done during a busy touring schedule for the group's second album Arc. Following this tour, they rented studio space in Wales in an effort to be "away and isolated", but nothing came of these sessions. The album itself was recorded at Angelic Studios in Northampton during 2014. The liner notes suggest several other spaces were also used for parts of the album, including Crotch Int. in Gilsland, Eve Studios in Bredbury, Making Do in Manchester, and Distillery in Wiltshire. They hinted at the album's production through their Twitter account in August 2014, and announced they were in the process of recording two weeks later.Everything Everything went into the studio aiming to "make people want to move", and set about avoiding slower-paced songs that had featured strongly on their previous album. This became apparent to them following the writing of eventual album closer "Warm Healer". Lead vocalist, Jonathan Higgs, told Anthem Magazine that "we kind of ripped up that rule book after realiing, 'Right. Let’s not write something this quiet. Let’s do horrible stuff from now on'". The group worked on ideas for songs as they came to them, rather than their previous method of practising and recording as a live group. Bass guitarist, Jeremy Pritchard, explained to Skiddle that the group were keen to create a record that would "stand up for the huge amount of time you spend touring a record", which in turn inspired a more pop-oriented sound than had appeared on Arc. Higgs later discussed how they used their previous sound to inform the direction of Get to Heaven, seeking to avoid "quiet songs" and "tenderness" in an effort to "inject a new fire into ourselves".
Though previous albums were produced by David Kosten, they enlisted the support of producer Stuart Price after he impressed them with his work on a demo version of the eventual single, "Regret". As Price was based in Los Angeles, the band emailed him samples of their work for him to critique and receive his suggested mixes in return. They had mixed reactions to his suggestions; at one point during production of "Hapsburg Lippp" – a track which did not make the final track listing – Price returned them a reggae-inspired mix as a joke. Higgs explained to Andy Morris of Gigwise that Price had an "ability to become one of us very quickly". Price joined them in person for the last nine days of recording. Guitarist Alex Robertshaw said to Digital Spy that his positivity made an impression on them: "Just another seriously creative person in the room with you is fantastic."
During recording sessions, Higgs suffered from depression. He referred to the end of their 150-date tour as "an out-of-the-sauna-and-into-a-cold-bath experience", adding that "riding that low as well as trying to make a record was quite hard". He was affected by frequent mood swings as a result of his medication; Pritchard said that these "affected pretty adversely". Drummer, Michael Spearman, explained to Q that Higgs's attempt to channel his depression into his writing worried the rest of the group. At one point during writing sessions, Higgs presented his bandmates with "Pigdog", a song about "how a horrible person and want to be one any more". Spearman objected to this style: "For me that was a turning point. I was like, 'Let's make a record that’s energetic and fucked up and exciting.'"
Composition
Music
Robertshaw told Drowned in SoundHiggs named Suicide's 1977 single "Frankie Teardrop" as a major influence on the album's sound, describing it as "genuinely scary music": "It's a song: I shouldn't be feeling like this." They tried to replicate this unsettling, unpredictable sound on the album, but "wanted a happy ending". In an interview with The Independent, Higgs spoke of Radiohead's critically acclaimed Kid A as a further influence, as they "threw out guitars, and with it the very idea of genre". Radiohead's influence on the record was commented on further by Laura Snapes at Pitchfork, who noted the use of a "paranoid guitar solo borrowed from Hail to the Thief". Critics would later refer to their sound generally as "maximalist art pop" or art rock. In other sections of the album, they experimented with other genres; Ludovic Hunter-Tilney of the Financial Times noted the "Talking Heads-style Afro-pop" of title track "Get to Heaven".
Most of the melodies on Get to Heaven originated from Robertshaw's guitar, though he recalled to Rich Chamberlain of MusicRadar that Higgs would occasionally approach the rest of the group with "an insane laptop creation" which would have to be translated to work as a group. Several tracks feature complex guitar solos, as noted by Chamberlain; one such solo, featured on the title track "Get to Heaven", was originally recorded in a hotel room. Another, on the single "Spring / Sun / Winter / Dread", makes heavy use of an MWFX Judder pedal. Robertshaw told Chamberlain that " is a bit of a signature for the new record... You can do totally unrealistic things with it and it makes you sound like Steve Vai on crack."
Lyrics
The album's themes revolve around events which took place in 2015, such as the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and the British media's handling of the United Kingdom general election, as well as on the state of humanity. Lead writer Higgs spent a year writing the album, time he spent watching rolling news and enveloping himself in current events. Pritchard told the London Evening Standard that "we're in an age where we're more conscious of you're constantly bombarded by information". Speaking to Chris Parkin of Red Bull, Higgs explained the songwriting process provided a kind of catharsis following the year's events: "It wasn't until after we finished that I looked back and thought, bloody hell, I was feeling that very heavily and I didn't realise until it was out of me." He later described the album as a "horror bible", and stated one of the unifying concepts was to litter the album "with predictions and clues that I was going to become a terrorist...become the other".The album's opening track, "To the Blade", has often been cited as focusing on the death of Manchester-born aid worker Alan Henning at the hands of ISIL's "Jihadi John"; Higgs explained to Drowned in Sound that: "He was a taxi driver from Stockport, I could have met him. And the fact that someone who did it was also from Britain, but this was being played out on a global scale... It seemed like the craziest thing I’d ever heard." However, Higgs later went on to say that Henning acted as more of a general inspiration for the album, and the song in particular was written as "...a letter to someone who is close a person who's done something terrible...It's something people won't consider for a second - that they could be one of these monsters if they were in different circumstances." Other songs criticise political leaders in the United Kingdom. Higgs had been vocal of his distaste of politics in interviews following the release of Arc. Several critics suggest that "The Wheel " is a commentary on the "snake-oil appeal" of then-UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage; Higgs told The Line of Best Fit that the song also comments on "religious leaders and charismatic, corrupt leaders, or even men as gods". "No Reptiles" supposes that political leaders are "just fat, bald, old men, like soft-boiled eggs, that are just weak-willed, with no strong feelings "; its lyrics also make cryptic reference to Elliot Rodger, who carried out the 2014 Isla Vista killings.
Much of the album is presented in-character through the eyes of various fictional characters and onlookers. "Fortune 500" documents a fictional attempt to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II, which Higgs relates to the thoughts of suicide bombers moments before they detonate: "The horror of the doubt is far worse than the act, for the terrorist I mean. It’s this 'oh shit... maybe this isn’t what God wants'. I think it's the darkest moment on the record." Spearman called the inclusion of loaded, political lyrics on otherwise upbeat songs "the Trojan Horse approach... get your interesting lyrical idea into something that on the face of it is just there to be enjoyed". Higgs told NME that Kanye West's 2013 album Yeezus had a major impact on his writing, encouraging him to present himself more confidently, while Nick Cave provided inspiration to be more impulsive with his writing.