RE-ANIMATOR

As a group, Everything Everything has always worn that indie art pop weirdness on its sleeve and its still refreshingly intact here, Re-animator is yet another flamboyant feather in the cap of a band that refuses to phone it in.

As with each album in the quartet’s canon, Re-Animator requires (and deserves) repeated listening. Once that is achieved then the dividends start to pay, and this darkly shaded album is revealed as a very different string to be added to the Everything Everything bow. The band continue to sound like nothing else around.

A record of sustained power, ‘Re-Animator’ manages to pull together many of the band’s finest elements, offering something complex yet accessible.

The instrumentals stay restlessly creative too, this time absorbing hip-hop cadences, wistful fiddles and dreamy post-punk. [Sep 2020, p.108]

Everything Everything continue on their quest to make intricate yet seamless electronic art pop. [Sep 2020, p.29]

A supremely intricate record which unfolds further with every listen - much like the brooding build of ‘In Birdsong’ - the band’s fifth album is, at times, a shadowy beast, and it’s sure to leave a mark.

If ‘Re-Animator’ felt like it was lacking the kind of knockout blow that Everything Everything have provided on every album, they saved it until last. Recent single and album closer ‘Violent Sun’ is the biggest revelation here. You could mistake its opening seconds of The Boss’ ‘Dancing In The Dark’, or its propulsive surge of drums and synths for New Order.

Throughout, RE-ANIMATOR's crisp, melancholy anthems, if less colorful than prior albums, remain captivating, bringing with them an existential poignancy that lingers beyond the closer, up-tempo rocker "Violent Sun," and its apocalyptic chorus ("I wanna be there!/When the wild wave comes/And we’re swept away").