All For One & One Is All: Turning Interconnectivity Into An Album

"We didn't know how it would turn out until we put that first song online," says 'Harry', one of the members of the eight-person collective Superorganism. The song he's talking about is Something For Your MIND, which debuted online in January 2017, released minus any bio or background. It quickly picked up steam - blogged about everywhere, Frank Ocean and Ezra Koenig spinning it on their radio shows - and, in the absence of any information ("we needed time to be able to come to terms with what the project was in our own minds before we publicised who we were as individuals"), theories abounded as to who was behind its wonky, sample-strewn pop.

"We saw loads of people speculating on who it could be, which we found really entertaining and really flattering," Harry says. "There were all sorts of theories on what prominent musicians it could be. It was like, 'Well, if you think it's possible we're Damon Albarn in disguise, we'll take that as a massive compliment.'"

As Superorganism released more singles - It's All Good, Nobody Cares, Everybody Wants To Be Famous - they were billed only as "a 17-year-old Japanese girl named Orono who lives in Maine and 7 other people who live in London"; which was, unbelievably, true. Their teenage singer, Orono Noguchi, was indeed attending boarding school in America. And, with the release of their self-titled album now nigh, the other members of Superorganism are coming to light.

Although a press release (and much press) forwards the myth, it only takes some cursory internet sleuthing to discover the particulars. 'Harry', it turns out, is Chris Young, an English-born, New Zealand-raised 27 year old. He played in a run of Kiwi combos in his salad days - Neil Robinson, The Insurgents - before, finally, joining The Eversons. That quartet spent years turning out oft-ridiculous jams for Lil' Chief Records (the label run by Jonathan Bree of The Brunettes), impishly hopping through genres.

In 2015, before the release of their second and final LP, 2016's Stuck In New Zealand, The Eversons ended up on a "totally random tour of Japan" after a local indie promoter discovered their music online. "We were like, 'If you set up the shows, we'll come!', not really believing it was going to happen," Young recounts. In the crowd at a Tokyo show was Noguchi, who was back in Japan for the summer. She'd discovered the band online - a YouTube algorithm had taken her from Princess Chelsea's much-clicked The Cigarette Duet to a video by The Eversons - and, after the show, she befriended them.

That Superorganism's formative-origin story involves the internet is telling, because it became both the way the collective came together and the subject of many of their songs. The Eversons had moved to London in that familiar attempt to make it, but found their career stalling, the quartet retreating into online circles. Tired of the prism of the rock band, all four members of The Eversons threw themselves into a new idea. "You end up creating these little communities with your friends, even if they largely exist online," Young explains. "We wanted to turn that into a recording project."

With Noguchi in America and the still-mysterious Korean member 'Seoul' living in Sydney, they "never considered that [they'd] ever play live", a liberating prospect for the former members of The Eversons. "We could make things as weird and experimental as we wanted," says Young. "Because we were including all these different people living in different cities, we wanted to make something that wouldn't be about any individual but about the pooling of creative minds."

At first, Superorganism recorded and released songs one-by-one, but when early attention begot a frenzy of label interest, eventually signing with indie-powerhouse Domino, they gathered their tunes for a proper debut. Young calls the resulting LP an "accidental concept record", the songs that sprouted in their "creatively fertile" formative days all suggesting a singular theme.

"Now, with hindsight, I can hear they're all about interconnectivity," Young offers, "whether that's between us as a group exploring our own identity, or the fact that the internet brought us together, or all our own ideas about the internet that run through the songs, or even the way humans interact with nature. Interconnectivity is the thread that runs through all the songs."

Superorganism (Domino) is out this month