Everything Is Alive

Slowdive has outdone itself on its fifth full-length, Everything Is Alive, which elevates its pre-breakup work in ways that feel nearly unimaginable. Indeed, Slowdive in 2023 is capable of writing both the hands-down most affecting song of its career (“Andalucia Plays”) as well as its most in-your-face (“The Slab”), while also incorporating modular synths as foundational elements in its creative process for the first time (they’re the first notes you hear on opener “Shanty”).

There’s not much on this album which will raise the eyebrows of anyone familiar with their previous work, as it falls somewhere between the fuzzy glow of 1993’s Souvlaki and the dispassionate chill of its follow-up Pygmalion. But Everything Is Alive is joyful listen regardless, taking the cloud tunnel bliss of the best shoegaze and adding some pure pop pleasure. Cinema for the ears? More like dream visions for the soul.

everything is alive feels practically self-contained, like a Slowdive record blissfully unaware it is a Slowdive record, most likely for the better. Simultaneously, the fact that everything is alive could have been a very different album is hard to dismiss. The songs that contain explicit traces of this minimal electronic framework are easily the strongest cuts and, most importantly, feel like a productive midway point between “Slowdive Slowdiving” and whatever Pygmalion worshippers keep hoping for.

Enchanting and illuminating, ‘everything is alive’ proves that Slowdive’s pulse is still beating strong.

These songs are indubitably vigorous and youthful. Moreover, there’s also a fleck of Slowdive's nostalgia and urgency spattered on them, like the golden sky at sunset, whose warm-coloured canvas quickly loses its treasured vibrance to nightly darkness.