Everything Was Beautiful, the ninth album by Jason Pierce’s space rock powerhouse Spiritualized, was crafted over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. Though multiple of the songs have existed for some time, (case in point, Always Together With You which was released as a demo on 2014’s The Space Project) the lockdown period gave Pierce the solitude he needed to coalesce the project into a single whole. The album has been described as a “sonic forest” of rich sound in the tradition of previous albums; critically, it has had a strongly positive response. The band has refined “orchestral space rock into an alchemical power that goes beyond concerns about novelty” (Pitchfork), “revelling in ecstatic keyboards and orchestral wallops”(The Guardian) to form a “strung-out church music and frazzled classic rock and free-jazz affectations and psychedelia both classicist and futuristic all blending together in an aesthetic that feels like a cosmic transmission”(Stereogum).
The title Everything Was Beautiful completes the Kurt Vonnegut-quoting title of And Nothing Hurt from his novel Slaughterhouse-Five.