Everyone Says Hi

“I’ve got an album title in my mind,” Nick Hodgson considers, poking another toe out from behind his hard-built, protective persona. “It’s Funny Cos It’s True. Because everything that is in the songs is what I really think, but I’m a funny guy – that’s my front.” 

The riot fizzles out, walls come tumbling down. Everyone Says Hi, Hodgson’s foray into lustrous retro-futurist songcraft, are one of the most intoxicating bands currently emerging from the UK for a myriad of reasons. Equally in thrall to Neil Young, Steely Dan, REM and Arcade Fire, they relish the rediscovery and reinvention of classic Seventies and Eighties textures as much as any War On Drugs, Tame Impala or Khruangbin, but have an unquenchable compulsion to add the glistening choruses that have been noticeably absent from much of this new wave of sepia sounds: “that’s all I can do,” Nick shrugs. They’re inherently in step with the direction of contemporary alt-rock (the Nilsson atmospheres, the country touches, the synthetic sheen) but also a wellspring of honest and personal responses to the modern age: its political turmoils, its technological threats, the pain behind the pretence. 

Case in point: ‘Real Friends’, the first formative spark of Everyone Says Hi’s second album. At first, Nick tries to brush it off as a song inspired by a Boyzone documentary which seemed to echo his own experiences in a major band. “I’ve been in a band with my friends from being young,” he says, “all the ups and downs and the jealousies and all those things.” But dig deeper and behind this sumptuous slide through the Seventies’ hazier side lurk old emotions triggered by the Kaisers Chiefs’ 20th anniversary celebrations in 2025: memories of Hodgson’s departure from the band in 2012, shortly after his father died from Alzheimer’s. 

“He died and I left the band, it was so tangled up,” he says. “So whenever anything happens like a 20th anniversary, it completely rocked me. The end of last year, I was just crying every day. It affected me so much. So that’s what ‘Real Friends’ is about. It’s about friendships, relationships, it’s about forgiveness, and there’s a bit of death as well. When you’ve cried a lot, all the songs just come out.” 

For all its emotional resonance, Everyone Says Hi is ultimately an uplifting, cathartic force. The band developed after Hodgson – who had spent his past decade writing for artists including John Newman, Dua Lipa, Shirley Bassey and Rat Boy, alongside collaborator Justin ‘Video Games’ Parker – released a 2017 single ‘Suitable’, the first sample from his 2018 solo album Tell Your Friends. Almost instantly, he was offered a support slot at The Cribs’ Christmas show in Leeds, despite having no band to play it. 

“I just said, ‘yes’,” he says. “I had two months to get the band.” Pulling in friends from other acts made for a semi-supergroup – Pete Denton of The Kooks, Ben Gordon from The Dead 60s and Glenn Moule of Howling Bells, alongside Leeds guitarist Tom Dawson – to tour the album in 2018. Then fatherhood and the pandemic cooled his boots, until a new song he found himself writing in 2023, ‘Only One’, began to feel like a new lease of solo life. The songs that followed were deeply personal affairs (“You get a bit older and you stop hiding,” Nick says) set within lush, sophisticated alt-pop frameworks and steeped in the swelling psych vibes of Gerry Rafferty, Tame Impala and White Denim. “I thought, ‘Okay, this is a new album’,” he recalls. “Called them all up, ‘I’m getting the band back together’.” 

Enter Everyone Says Hi, accidentally named after the 2002 David Bowie song (Nick had a list of potential names including Everyone Say Hi, but altered it after learning of the Bowie tune). Recording and touring their self-titled 2025 debut album made them far less of a dictatorship; the skill, pedigree and camaraderie of the band creating a formidable creative unit. “We’re literally a band now – decisions, everything, which I like,” Nick says. “Everyone’s totally into it and they are amazing musicians – they’ll hear a song once, and they’ll just play it.” 

Work on ESH’s second album began in just such an inspired fashion, the band laying down an instant demo of ‘Real Friends’ in Nick’s North London home studio in November 2024. Six months of writing later, they reconvened to record the album, with the band in full collaboration mode “It’s just brilliant to see things come alive. When I make a demo I suddenly think, ‘oh, shit, is this how good it’s going to be? Is this the level we’re at?’ And then the rest of the band will come in and elevate it.” 

Over sporadic sessions from May to September 2025, they put together a grand expansion on the sounds and themes of their debut. In an en vogue psych-funk mode, ‘Communication’ delves deeper into the dislocation of 21st Century screen-life. “I like technology, but when you see the baby in the pram and the baby in the pram is looking at the phone, I don’t really like it,” Nick says. “It’s like total entertainment forever – it’s like ‘Can I just have one minute off?’” 

The spare, loose and intimate ‘Everyone’s Gonna Lose’ touches on social media’s inherent inhumanity – “the endless argument that never stops, because no one wants to learn. Everyone’s gonna lose” – but, as with ‘What You Were Looking For’, it also targets the MAGA movement in ironically country tones. “We tried it all different ways, and it went back to country,” Nick says. “There’s no escaping it.” 

On more personal levels, infectious tracks such as ‘I Know Myself’ and ambient rocker ‘Life Isn’t Perfect’ are hook-laden self-notes on resilience, appreciation and determination. “I’m always still reaching,” Nick says. “Doing something twice is really hard, but I want to do it one more time to prove it to me, or to prove to everyone else. In my head, I’ve still got all these people I want to prove it to.” And most touching of all is ‘Don’t Underestimate Yourself’, a multi-harmonied open letter to his seven-year old daughter, entreating her not to lose hold on her self-belief. 

“She’s very confident, she’s dead excited, doesn’t care about trying something,” Nick says. “I just want her to know that in the future, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. There’s a lyric that says ‘boys will come along and try and change your mind’. I don’t even mean boyfriend-girlfriend. It’s just that at some point, some boy, a man, whatever, will tell you you can’t do that, and just keep going. Just don’t lose it.” 

It’s heartening because it’s deeply, therapeutically true. Come say Hi.