Tired of writing pop dystopias, the art-rockers approached their new album by ‘abandoning the human brain’ and feeding Confucius and Beowulf into a bot they named Kevin
A common criticism of pop music today is that it is too dominated by technology. Vocals are smoothed into perfect pitch and drums or synths come from presets, the end result being that too many songs sound almost the same. They are lacking humanity, those critics say – literally brainless.
For Raw Data Feel, their superb new album, Everything Everything have gone further still, “abandoning the human brain”, says singer Jonathan Higgs, in favour of artificial intelligence. “Not until we were about halfway through,” he elaborates over a cuppa in a Manchester bar. “But, yeah, that’s exactly what we did.”
