What does an album fueled by AI sound like? The latest release by Everything Everything.

A few weeks ago, British alternative rock band Everything Everything released a new album, Raw Data Feel. The lyrical genius of most, if not all of the songs were penned by an Artificial Intelligence program, which was supposedly fed “the entire Linkedin Ts&Cs, the epic poem Beowulf, 400,000 4Chan posts and Confucius’s teachings.” However, vocalist Jonathan Higgs’s lyrics have historically resembled garbled nonsense spat out by a machine, with high-concept and nonsensical metaphors often layered over mechanical rock beats. As such, the contribution of AI to Raw Data Feel is indistinguishable from Higg’s handiwork. The band seems to be maintaining its status quo, finding new ways to blend its much-loved old sound (healding back to Get to Heaven) with immaculate production value and the thoughtful placement of found sounds and references to technology and popular culture. 

The music videos to accompany these fresh technology-driven sounds are equally fascinating. Lead single “Bad Friday” sees the band perform in a black-and-white void that becomes slowly distorted and colourised by disturbing AI images. The visuals resemble those half-forgotten mental pictures of places you’ve only seen once. Another great track, “Teletype”, is accompanied by a music video of AI-generated faces lip-syncing to the lyrics. If this wasn’t disturbing enough, the faces are rapidly melting between identities (as well as some failed experiments that seem to have broken the AI). The result is profoundly unsettling and is representative of the song’s dichotomy, which sings of trauma against upbeat electronics. 

The AI that contributed to Everything Everything’s new album was lovingly named “Kevin” and was credited as such. However, what happens when AI is tasked with writing song lyrics. Who was the writer? Should the AI receive a songwriting credit? Who owns the copyright? Can AI be infringed against? This raises so many questions!