Everything Everything treat us to a distorted reality animated visual tale for their explosive new single In Birdsong.

It’s been a while since we were last treated to new material from the Manchester quartet, but the anticipation is finally over as we are introduced to their latest single release In Birdsong. The track is the first new music from the band since the release of their Deeper Sea EP in 2018, which followed their Mercury Prize nominated fourth album A Fever Dream in 2017.

Although releasing new music this time around was not part of their plans, frontman Jonathan Higgs expressed the band’s desire ‘to be responsive to the changed landscape [of the current pandemic]’ With more experimental sonics than before, impressive falsettos and choppy electronic synths, the five minute track offers an optimistic light of hope in a dark time which is evident in the track’s remarkable accompanying visuals. With Higgs on animating and directing duty, the end result might seem rather confusing at first but undoubtedly a colourful cinematic visual that deserves a second watch to fully comprehend its beauty.

To get a deeper understanding of the track’s inspiration, have a read below of what Jonathan Higgs had to say:

‘In Birdsong’ tries to imagine what it would have been like to have been the first self-aware human.

I had come across a concept by psychology academic Julian Jaynes, the Bicameral Mind Theory: the idea that at one stage humans had two separate minds, one inside each half of our brains, and messages or commands would be delivered by one and received by the other. These ‘voices’ were thought to be those of the divine. The theory claims that the eventual melding of these two minds into the two-sided human brain we have now was the dawn of mankind’s consciousness

I wanted to somehow insert this evolutionary psychology into a song because I felt so in awe of the idea. I found a deep sense of wonder at its core, about life and the world. It applies to songs about love, sex, life, death and humanity – the things I’ve always written about.

We weren’t intending to share this song right now, but in the age of Coronavirus, we wanted to be responsive to the changed landscape and ‘In Birdsong’ unexpectedly emerged as the most appropriate song to reappear with. Birdsong has accompanied human life since before we were even human, but in the recent century it has been obscured or pushed out of our lives. In the song I talk about hearing birdsong and knowing we are conscious and alive. With fewer cars and planes, and less human intervention generally, we’ve all been given the opportunity to reconnect with resurgent nature, and where we all are, for this brief moment – In Birdsong.