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About This Track
Everything Everything build 'Distant Past' around a simple, propulsive rhythm and robot-processed vocal samples that give the track a mechanical, almost inhuman quality. The song moves at pace, its energy relentless, whilst the production sits somewhere between pop and something altogether stranger. Jonathan Higgs sings of regression and escape, his lyrics collapsing evolutionary time into a single desperate plea: the repeated refrain asks for permission to abandon the present entirely, to retreat into something older and simpler. The imagery is deliberately grotesque. Higgs describes physical degradation and transformation with the matter-of-factness of someone narrating a fever dream, limbs severed and bodies failing, all set against the song's bright, almost cheerful momentum. There is a tension between the brightness of the arrangement and the darkness of what is being sung, between the desire to go backwards and the knowledge that such escape is impossible. The result is unsettling in a way that feels intentional, a track that refuses to settle into comfort even as it insists, over and over, that comfort is all it wants.
"Distant Past" is a single by Everything Everything, from the album Get To Heaven (Expanded 10th Anniversary edition), released 3rd July 2025. The track is 3:42 long. It's filed under Alternative. Full lyrics are available below. Dork has published 18 articles about Everything Everything.
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Everything Everything’s seventh album imagines a civilisation that builds upward by forcing its people to live ever deeper in the quarry below.
Before ‘Man Alive’, Everything Everything used limited vinyl singles and homemade videos to put their first ideas into public view.
Jonathan Higgs saw more than a road-rage punchline in the viral video behind Everything Everything’s ‘The End Of The Contender’.
Sundara Karma’s 2019 second album kept the hooks of their debut but opened its writing and production to bigger questions, stranger arrangements and maximalist pop ambition.
A five-song route into Everything Everything, from the immediate pull of ‘I Want A Love Like This’ to the grand, uneasy reach of ‘Leviathan’.
Seriously, guys, this is the kind of stuff that wakes us up at 4am.
