If you talk to anyone from my generation, you'll find that we're pretty much in agreement about one thing: the world is absolutely, positively, fucked. Almost beyond repair, and on almost every metric you care to look at. Of course, a powerful media apparatus has spun up a whole optimism industry around this fact. You'll get a bunch of chuds with pretty charts and articles from The Economist, trying to convince you that "No, we're actually wealthier across the board than ever before because you can now buy 100 TVs on a single income, when before you couldn't even buy one." These people are idiots. They've bought the enlightenment myth of the rational man, they read Sapiens when they were 16 and now think the world is just numbers. They have terminal engineer-brain that might be able to solve partial derivatives in imaginary space, but struggle with anything unquantifiable. They live in a world of theory. They've quantified every inch of Plato's Cave but they don't know they're inside.
The thing with numbers, with data, is that they abstract the real world into projections. This is great in some respects, we have little brains, but we can understand the idea behind a line that goes up or down. The problem we have is that any collection or storage of data loses information. Analysis of the data into pithy insights loses more information. Presentation of the data onto a nice chart is, really, a re-projection of a hand-drawn sketch of a single angle of a real, multidimensional thing onto a flickering shadow on a cave wall. Data is not the real world, it's not even close to the real world. It's an abstraction of an abstraction. The world is an experience, a phenomenology. To truly understand the past, we turn not to the engineers, or the accountants, or even the historians. We turn to the artists, the poets, the authors, the composers, the painters and sculptors. Art is crystallised phenomenology, the only way one can share their visceral experience of the world with others, at least partially.
Why start this with a diatribe on the technocracy? Because this album is about capitalism. It's about the nonsensical machinations of a system that is destroying everything. The world's biggest AI isn't some bullshit made by OpenAI, running on silicon and boiling entire lakes to do your kid's homework; it runs on carbon. The paperclip maximiser has been playing out in real life for the last 150 years, but with mass deregulation in the 80s across much of the Western World, followed by the subjugation of the global south with neoliberal instruments such as the World Bank and the IMF, we've seen a huge acceleration of this behaviour, to the detriment of everyone.
Mountainhead is a concept album about a cult of people building a mountain by digging a giant pit. The mountain has been growing for as long as anyone can remember, and they no longer remember why they were building the mountain in the first place. As the mountain grows larger, the pit grows deeper, affecting the health of the diggers. There are a couple of other plot points; an elite group who live on the mountain acts as quasi-priests for the cult, and at the bottom of the pit is rumoured to be a deadly golden serpent that the group will encounter if they dig too far. It's a clever allegory, and while not overly subtle, media literacy is dead. The time for subtlety has passed.
Like all of Everything Everything's outings, it features incredible production, catchy hooks, and obtuse lyrics. Truly unlike anything else. Cold Reactor is a highlight, but I genuinely love every song.
Perhaps what I love about this album the most is the absurdity of the entire thing. A lot of social commentary can feel surface-level or juvenile. Just look at Muse's Drones, or how most people seem to understand Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. There's a lot of depth to the allegory, and its absurdity holds a mirror up to capital that is more immediately effective than any wordy materialist critique. Why? Life is phenomenology, and the only way to get people to understand what is happening is to pull them out of their caves. They need to experience the world, not merely measure it. They need to feel, deep in their bones, the absurdity of this system we've built. Nothing changes otherwise. It won't be critical theory or endless 'reasonable debate' or voting that starts the change of the tide. It'll start with art. It'll start with culture.