Everything You Wanted becomes the third offering off Maximum Sorrow!, the anticipated next album by London post punk band, Desperate Journalist. Every single thus far suggests that the group's fourth full length has the hallmarks of a milestone.
"Everything You Wanted started off being about the artist Kevin Bewersdorf. I often wonder if he's OK.," details singer Jo Bevan. "He was the creator of the original Maximum Sorrow! art project, who had a large online catalogue of his internet art for years throughout the 2000s which gradually became more and more spiritual and abstract; the last series of works he created were these really intricate and quite beautiful animated gif mandalas to use while meditating. He then deleted everything on his site and replaced it with a blank page coloured a deep pure blue with nothing but a tiny animated gif of a flame constantly flickering at the bottom - was it a nervous breakdown or an artistic breakthrough? The two often go hand in hand don't they.
"The song mentions some of his work and ideas, as well as the Nine Eyes of Google Streetview, another sort of Modern Romanticist piece of internet art. All of these artworks have this sense of transfiguring the online mundane - the world of commerce, watermarked stock images, Google Maps, etc - into something almost cosmically affecting and mysterious. I think they are so successful because they have an air of self-awareness to them, in that the imagery is so commonplace that it can sometimes be almost amusing - which makes them feel very human and not as po-faced as many more traditional Romanticist works.
"So in the song I am trying to express the melancholic surge you feel when you experience them, and to relate this to the Millennial search for validation and meaning. And then of course it links back to my own personal feelings of failure and existential pointlessness, as it inevitably does - I was born in the 1980s after all."
The song's existentialist identity is defined by Bevan's firm vocal delivery, together with the soundly built instrumentals which make up a rather note-perfect endeavor of post punk and alternative pop attributes.
Maximum Sorrow! comes out on July 2nd, 2021 through Fierce Panda Records.
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