Plans were taking shape for the marketing campaign around Everything Everything’s fifth album, Re-Animator, when the global Covid-19 pandemic hit. Overnight photo shoots, video shoots, face-to-face promo and live plans had to be cancelled.

At that early stage in the pandemic, none of us knew when the band would be able to even be together again. We doubled down and began to re-think the more traditional aspects of our marketing and promotion plans.

Our timeline completely shifted, as did our choice of launch song. Our original choice of first single suddenly didn’t feel right both in terms of its lyrical content or its overall sentiment when set against the backdrop of a very scary and worrying time, so we decided to choose the most surprising and unexpected song from the album to launch the campaign. ‘In Birdsong’ was the perfect song to soundtrack the surreal and unsettling nature of the world in April 2020. The fact that people in Wuhan were reporting hearing birdsong in their traffic-free streets for the first time in years made us realise it was the right way to start things off.

Without any potential in-person shoots happening, Jonathan Higgs (lead vocals, guitar) decided he would teach himself to use 3D modelling software and create something unexpected for the song’s accompanying video. The song and visual really struck a chord with fans on its release and gave the band a renewed profile within the market.

With Jon’s new skills in 3D animation – the techniques he was using and the warped results he was achieving – suddenly gave us a visual palette for the whole campaign. A traditional photoshoot was replaced with individual phone photos of each band member, twisted and manipulated in a digital nightmare, strangely poignant against the backdrop of 2020.

These warped 3D images also gave the album artwork and related online assets a visual identity and tied the whole campaign together.

Alongside the more common lockdown content of 2020, such as remotely filmed live session performances for each track released and livestream Q&As, we tried a host of forwardthinking new activations which all drew influence from the overall campaign visual aesthetic.

Only Everything Everything could write a song about a sentient fatberg and we took this warped concept further by animating one for the music video and creating an Instagram AR face filter which allowed users to turn themselves into the fatberg and also place a dancing fatberg on any surface their camera landed on.

For a band used to connecting with their audiences in a live setting, 2020 offered some real challenges; but by embracing virtual fan engagement and interaction, we managed to create a dialogue around Re-Animator online.

The most ambitious example of this was Everything Everything – Virtual RE-ANIMATOR. Created within Sansar, a social virtual reality platform, the concert was performed by the band in a bespoke VR world which incorporated much of the 3D modelled creations that were in the official music videos and artwork from the album. Fans could enter this Re-Animator world via VR headset, interact with other fans, dance, buy virtual merch for their avatar to wear and even join the band in a virtual meet & greet at the end of the show.