I originally started this project, "Everything Everything Everything", as a separate part of my blog, planning to eventually write analyses of entire albums. That did not happen. It's just regular posts now.

RAW DATA FEEL by Everything Everything is fascinating to me, because it fails in ways that are interesting. It has by far the worst lyrics of any of their albums (check out "Shark Week" or "Pizza Boy" if you don't believe me), but the ways the lyrics are bad is interesting in itself.

That's because they used LLMs to help write the lyrics. It wasn't the current generation of LLMs of course; this album came out in 2022, so instead they used a custom LLM they trained with a researcher from the University of York. They clearly were approaching this from the perspective of artists using a tool, rather than trying to get around the effort required to create something "quality". The lyrics are free-flowing and free-associative. Pure vibes.

"Teletype," the opening track, is lyrically the most interesting song to me. It almost makes sense, almost has a coherent theme. It almost feels like something that a human being would intentionally write, even though the lyricist admitted in a livestream (according to Genius, I haven't watched the livestream to check) that the song was mostly improvised. Somehow it feels that pulling these lyrics out of the slop, some of the machine and some out of Higgs's brain, led to something that palpates the truth, rather than explaining it.

Something about this band, man. It was made in a lab to appeal to me, the technological beneficiary of modern capitalism who can't stand its effects on the people around me, and the people exploited by it who I will never meet.