After putting us through the nightmare-fuel of the music videos for “Arch Enemy” and “In Birdsong”, we might have expected Everything Everything to put on the brakes a little with their latest one. And we’d be right – well, sort of. The Manchester quartet just released the video for “Planets”, the third single from their upcoming album Re-Animator.
‘Planets’. Out Now. Chat with Jonathan and Jeremy on Instagram Live tonight at 19:00 BST.
Listen/watch here: https://t.co/Jo7SlvJjxq
Pre-order the new album here: https://t.co/q0sePLUbuy pic.twitter.com/xUoJg03iFU
— EverythingEverything (@E_E_) June 18, 2020
Unlike the previous two efforts, “Planets” arrived with little to no fanfare. Snippets of the song were teased on Everything Everything’s official Instagram account yesterday, referred to as “Bigots In The Batcave” (the opening words to “Planets”) by a fictitious group called Infinity Face (an old name Everything Everything used to go by). To those who hadn’t already figured out what was coming, the band dropped the music video at midnight last night, revealing that they are doing an Instagram livestream at 7pm today to provide more details about the song.
While “Planets” shares the upbeat synth lines of “Arch Enemy”, thankfully for all our sakes frontman Jonathan Higgs opted to give us a break from visual torment when directing this video. Dancing globs of gelatin and rupturing fatbergs have been swapped out for the cutesy antics of a chimpanzee hand puppet. “Can you love me?/More than the planets”, the cuddly fella mimes along to Higgs’ voice. It’s hardly on par with the visceral torment in these lyrics from “Arch Enemy”: “Sphinx of grease, faceless bloat/Sacrifice in your name/Blubber mount, sewage moon/Jets like wire cut your body, they/Slice your teats”.
The uncanniness of our simian cousins – so parallel to our own existence yet aeons apart – is a frequent concern of the band’s, popping up in older cuts “Schoolin”, “Distant Past”, and “NASA Is On Your Side”. But at the start of the video at least, there’s no evolutionary existential dread here (though I wouldn’t be surprised if the goofy dancing chimp was a subtle dig at Coldplay).
“‘Planets’ is a song about calling out to be loved, feeling unworthy and finding the love of the universe instead”, says Higgs in The Line of Best Fit’s coverage of the story – an oddly literal analysis of the song’s refrain from a man whose lyricism is usually so inscrutable. Perhaps this evening’s livestream will shed some new light on things; it’s hard to not ignore the emphasis placed on a single aeroplane and a solitary bee, and their associations with the effects of climate change. It would certainly put a new spin on the song’s central question “Can you love me?/More than the planets”. Watch the music video below to decide for yourself.
Recorded at London’s RAK studios with producer John Congleton, Re-Animator will be released on the 21st of August via Infinity Industries. You can preorder the album through Everything Everything’s website here.
