“Arch Enemy” is the second single from Everything Everything’s fifth LP, RE-ANIMATOR. Speaking to Annie Mac during the BBC Radio 1 debut of the song, singer Jonathan Higgs introduced it as “a weird one, even for us”.

The song follows a man who hears voices and, having more of a bicameral mind than the self-awareness that modern humans typically have, he assumes that the voices are from a god. He searches for his God and, as Higgs described it to the NME:

Finding only a congregation of greed, toxicity and waste, in the form of a sentient fatberg in the sewer, he duly prays to it, willing it to purge the decadent world above that has created it.

Weird indeed! This is not the first time that the imagery of fat has been central to an Everything Everything song. No Reptiles, from 2015 album Get To Heaven, contains a similar upwelling of lipids, with Higgs describing it thusly to The Line Of Best Fit:

The song has this theme of fat pouring down the streets and clogging every hole – that’s how I was feeling about the general public, me included. We’re just this blobby, inactive, privileged, big, pale blob, and I wanted to use this metaphor of this massive fat-tsunami washing through the city streets and going into the gutters.