A month ago, when I reported on Everything Everything’s previous new music video for the track “In Birdsong”, I called its visuals “so disturbing we were left wondering if we were better off not knowing what lay in store”. How naïve I was to think that was the grossest the group had to offer.
Everything Everything first debuted “Arch Enemy” on the 13th of May during Annie Mac’s BBC Radio 1 show, confirming that it was the second single (after “In Birdsong”) from their rumoured upcoming fifth album Re-Animator. Unlike with the release of their previous single, “Arch Enemy” initially dropped with no video attached. But that changed on Monday, when the group posted a clip onto Twitter promising the music video would premier at 6pm on Wednesday via their YouTube channel (yesterday).
The music video for ‘Arch Enemy’ will be premiering this Wednesday 27th May on @YouTube at 18:00 BST. pic.twitter.com/rA6Jdo5pTj
— EverythingEverything (@E_E_) May 25, 2020
Similar to the rollout of “In Birdsong” – which preceded the unsettling music video with idyllic soundbites of literal birdsong – Monday’s clip showed a camera panned across a sunlit digitally-rendered high street, before hovering forebodingly over a manhole. Sure enough, yesterday’s video has us take a dive down into the gutters below the city. The furious, throbbing mass of gelatin dancers writhe to the song, whose bouncy synths akin to Saint Etienne’s cover of “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” sit at odds with the video’s uneasy subject matter. And we’ve not even reached the gross part yet. As the glutinous mob makes its way past frontman Jonathan Higgs’ head, clumsily green-screened into the foreground singing “Fatberg you smile/With your grave wax eyes”, we encounter the fatberg in question, a fever-dreamt amalgamation resembling the unholy spawn of Crazy Frog and Jabba the Hutt. The dancers convulse in an orgiastic frenzy before the fatberg explodes upwards out the manhole, consuming the entire city in a tsunami of… well, you know what.
Tonight at 18:00 BST, the music video for ‘Arch Enemy’ will be premiering on @YouTube Join the premiere countdown now: https://t.co/1JfbN6ZDM8 pic.twitter.com/pQQfiHPV6s — EverythingEverything (@E_E_) May 27, 2020
If you feel like trying to make sense of all that, Higgs stated in a press release that “‘Arch Enemy’ sees a modern-day protagonist searching for a meaningful God. Finding only a congregation of greed, toxicity, and waste, in the form of a sentient fatberg in the sewer, he duly prays to it, willing it to purge the decadent world above that has created it. These growing grease mountains are a curious juxtaposition of the modern and the ancient; a brand new example of archaic squalor”.
The official music video for ‘Arch Enemy’ is out now. Watch here: https://t.co/1JfbN6ZDM8 pic.twitter.com/VGI6LvWkbS
— EverythingEverything (@E_E_) May 27, 2020
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 their website here, and you can watch the music video for “Arch Enemy” below. Just make sure you haven’t eaten anything in the last five minutes.
