Everything Everything share their new song “In Birdsong.” The song, is their first new music, since the release of their 2018 EP Deeper Sea. for the track, Everything Everything brought in John Congleton, the producer is known for his work on St. Vincent’s self-titled album, while his other credits include Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen and Future Islands.

Everything Everything’s Jonathan Higgs on “In Birdsong:”

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.”

Higgs further explores those themes in the track’s accompanying visual. When the lockdown made the prospect of filming a conventional video impossible, Higgs instead dedicated his time to teaching himself computerised animation.

The result is the ‘In Birdsong’ visual, which he created entirely independently. It revolves around striking visual contrasts as the scenery twists from naturalistic to apocalyptic to otherworldly. Meanwhile the people it depicts are close to being photo-realistic, a disarming blend of humanity distorted by technology.