Everything will release their eighth album, ‘Poison Pop’, on March 12, with frontman Jonathan Higgs telling NME this week that the record is a deliberate slap in the face to the “enshittification” of the world around them — a full-throttle, punk-leaning return born from a year spent touring the 10th anniversary of 2015’s ‘Get To Heaven’.
Here is the kicker: the album lands at a moment when the band’s own decade-old warnings feel less like predictions and more like headlines. ‘Poison Pop’ tackles social media’s dopamine addiction, endless rage-bait, and the creeping acceptance of “AI slop” in art — all filtered through a band that rejected roughly 80 to 90 songs before settling on the final tracklist.
Three Things to Know About ‘Poison Pop’ Right Now
- The album arrives March 12 as the follow-up to 2024’s abstract, synth-driven ‘Mountainhead’, but Higgs wanted something “much more in your face.”
- Its central metaphor is addiction: a poisonous pop you keep drinking because the hit feels amazing, mirroring how people consume rage-bait and AI-generated content.
- The band wrote it while celebrating 10 years of ‘Get To Heaven’, an album whose alt-right prophecies Higgs says “nearly everything bad that could have happened, has happened.”
A Decade-Old Warning Ignites Everything’s Loudest Record Yet
The road to ‘Poison Pop’ runs straight through the band’s past. Last year, the British art-rockers hit the road to mark a decade since ‘Get To Heaven’, a blistering record written on the cusp of Brexit, Trump’s rise, and what was then called the alt-right revolution. “‘Get To Heaven’ is a very aggressive record, and I’m 10 years older now,” Higgs told NME, “so it was a case of being like ‘Hey, guys, remember how fucking insane we used to be?’”
That nostalgia for their own ferocity set the tempo. “In some sense, that got us in the mood to make another fast record,” he added. Where ‘Mountainhead’ hid behind metaphor at arm’s length, the new album refuses to let listeners look away. The practical result was a brutal culling: after writing dozens of songs, guitarist Alex Robertshaw and Higgs handed roughly 20 to the rest of the band and let them pick the final cuts — “a bit unnerving,” Higgs admitted, but a way to get real perspective.
Why ‘Poison Pop’ Treats the Feed Like a Drink That Kills You
The title track distills the album’s thesis into one image.
“It’s about this drink that kills you, but you still want it. That’s how I’m living my life, and how a lot of people are too.”
That same logic runs through ‘Blood Radio’, a song about a station that drives listeners insane with rage — and everyone keeps listening anyway, because anger feels good in the moment.
Higgs says the record is ultimately about wrestling with a choice: succumb to the “enshittification of everything around you,” or actively reject it. He insists he doesn’t want to preach. “I don’t like preaching or listening to people tell me their opinions,” he said. “What I wanted was to reflect the chaos of opinion.” The album’s conflicting messages and overarching sense of addiction are meant to mirror the uncertainty towering over right now, when, as he put it, “the safety nets feel like they’ve been ripped away.”
Jonathan Higgs on AI Slop: Handmade Art in a Factory World
The band was an early adopter of AI imagery — Higgs believes the ‘Raw Data Feel’ cover was among the first AI-generated album covers — but his view has hardened as the technology spread. He calls AI a useful tool, yet draws a hard line: if you genuinely fear an AI can do what you do, “then you shouldn’t be doing it.”
Art made by humans, he suggests, will only grow in value as machine-made “slop” floods the market — “like a vase that’s made in a factory. There’s 20,000 of them made in a day, but put it next to one handmade one, and which one do you think is worth saving in a fire?” That conviction shapes the songs themselves: the band now writes with the stage in mind, asking how four people with two hands each can perform it live, because, as Higgs notes, that is “an area that AI can’t get us yet.”
The Timeline That Shaped the Eighth Album
Everything’s catalog reads like a running commentary on the last decade — which is exactly why the anniversary tour mattered.
| Milestone | When | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| ‘Mountainhead’ released | 2024 | Abstract, synth-heavy predecessor the band refused to repeat |
| ‘Poison Pop’ arrives | March 12 | Eighth album, cut from ~20 songs after rejecting 80–90 |
Looking backward is unusual for this band. Asked about marking 10 years of ‘A Fever Dream’, Higgs demurred — “never say never” — but said they don’t want to get “bogged down in looking backwards.” His only caveat was characteristically dry: if everyone hates the new record, “we might have to!”
Live Shows as the Last Place AI Can’t Reach
The goal now is connection — “because connection is all we ever want,” he said, in “a very chaotic era” where it is “increasingly difficult to connect.” For a band fighting the isolation of the feed, the gig might be “one place you can do it.”
You can trace the full conversation in the original NME interview, where Higgs also weighs in on culture wars, Fontaines D.C.’s similar themes, and why he avoids listening to contemporaries while writing. And when he revisits ‘Get To Heaven’ now, the verdict is stark: “This is what we were saying 10 years ago and we weren’t wrong, but, quite frankly, I wish we were.”
