Cough Cough

"Cough Cough" announced a more abrasive Everything Everything to anyone who'd written the band off as quirky art-pop. The opening is abrupt and slightly wrong-footed, a rhythmically lurching groove that keeps pulling the rug out beneath you. Jonathan Higgs's vocals here are deployed as percussive objects as much as melodic instruments — clipped, chopped, processed in ways that blur the line between voice and texture. The lyrical register is satirical and disgusted, circling modern anxieties around consumption, performance, and societal decay with the kind of dense, accumulative imagery that benefits from reading along while listening. It shares DNA with the jagged punk-funk of early Bloc Party and the elastic rhythmic vocabulary of Talking Heads, but the production density is distinctly contemporary. The song doesn't offer a clean emotional exit — it winds tighter rather than releasing. The chorus is almost confrontational in how it refuses to be conventionally satisfying. Released in 2013 from "Arc," it marked the band committing fully to a more dissonant, politically charged identity. You'd put it on when you want music that matches a kind of sour alertness — commuting through a city that feels aesthetically and morally wrong, or cooking dinner while half-listening to news that makes you want to throw something.