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Every Open Eye

Every Open Eye
CHVRCHES - Every Open Eye.png
Studio album by Chvrches
Released 25 September 2015 (2015-09-25)
Recorded 2015
Studio Alucard Studios
(Glasgow, Scotland)
Genre Synth-pop
Length 42:02
Label
Producer Chvrches
Chvrches chronology
The Bones of What You Believe
(2013)
Every Open Eye
(2015)
Singles from Every Open Eye
  1. "Leave a Trace"
    Released: 17 July 2015
  2. "Never Ending Circles"
    Released: 12 August 2015
  3. "Clearest Blue"
    Released: 10 September 2015
  4. "Empty Threat"
    Released: 19 October 2015
  5. "Bury It"
    Released: 10 June 2016
Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source Rating
Metacritic 77/100
Review scores
Source Rating
AllMusic 4/5 stars
Alternative Press 3.5/5 stars
The A.V. Club A
Billboard 4/5 stars
NME 4/5 stars
Pitchfork 7.7/10
PopMatters 7/10 stars
Rolling Stone 3.5/5 stars
Slant Magazine 4/5 stars
Spin 7/10

Every Open Eye is the second studio album by Scottish synth-pop band Chvrches, released on 25 September 2015 by Virgin EMI Records and Goodbye Records. Self-produced, it is the band's follow-up to their critically acclaimed debut album, The Bones of What You Believe (2013). The album title comes from a lyric in the song "Clearest Blue". The album received positive reviews from music critics and was listed on several year-end best-of lists.

Chvrches began work on their second album in January 2015, six weeks after returning from touring to promote their previous album The Bones of What You Believe. Like The Bones of What You Believe, recording took place in Alucard Studios, located in a basement flat owned by Cook, refurbished with the advance for the new album. The group were able to make enough money from sales of their debut studio album, which entered the top 10 of the UK Albums Chart as well as peaking at number 12 on the US Billboard 200, to afford to record in a better studio for their next album. However, according to Iain Cook, the group had "kind of [...] took [Alucard] over" when recording of the first LP ended, despite the fact that they were still renting the place at the time, and decided to stay in the studio to produce Every Open Eye: "we wanted to go right back to where it all started. Partly, I guess, superstitiously. There’s something in the room that we didn’t want to lose, and we’d rather invest the money that we had available into upgrading the gear and patching it all in — just making it exactly the way we wanted it, rather than giving it to some other studio and another producer in LA or wherever.” Doherty said that the low rent price of the place gave the members less worry about risking waste of production costs, therefore allowing more freedom for experimentation that he felt was needed in making electronic music. The Neumann KH120A monitors that were used in this room were also used for the recording of the Bones album, which they praised as "kind of easy to get along with, but at the same time quite representative of what’s going on".

There were changes in production tools and equipment in the making of Every Open Eye. Chvrches now used Steinberg's Cubase as their digital audio workstation instead of the company's Nuendo, the latter having many features the group didn't need to use. Instead of using old drum machine sounds from libraries and timing them with MIDI, loops of rhythms executed from a Dave Smith Instruments Tempest analogue drum machine and Roland TR-8 drum machine was record used for making drum parts instead of samples from libraries that were featured on Bones. Doherty said, "we don’t perfectly shape every single sound — snare drums cutting off in weird places, fills that have got deliberately cut-up samples. But more importantly, I want to see, ‘Here’s my verse, here’s my chorus.’ I find it a much more musical way to write drums if you can see what’s going on and refer to the rest of the song at the same time. So we’ve maintained that philosophy throughout.” In addition to the basement, Every Open Eye was also made in the second room of Alucard, where engineer David Simpson recorded Mayberry's vocals, which featured a prefabricated vocal booth the group bought from the internet for the room and were pleased with, while Doherty would be in the basement working on the instrumentals. Simpson had agreed to let the group use his room if they let him work on the record. Doherty described him as a "great guy, a supreme talent. He’s the only person that we trusted to come in and take charge of some of the technical aspects of what we were doing." Another difference was the subwoofers the band used; to match the Neumann monitors, the group used Neumann subwoofers instead of Tannoy subwoofers.


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