Everything Is Alive

Sessions booked for April 2020 were cancelled by the pandemic, and the band entered the studio in September 2020. During that period Goswell lost her mother and Scott lost his father, and the sleeve carries a dedication in loving memory of Anthony John Scott and Valerie Ann Goswell. Halstead wrote all the songs, and said the music was an escape from the darkness the members were going through. It grew from material he wrote on modular synthesisers in 2019 for a planned electronic solo record, and Pitchfork's Jayson Greene wrote that Halstead first conceived it as a minimal techno record. Halstead was unsure about Kisses because it felt too pop to him. Prayer Remembered began as an arpeggiated synth line, with Scott running guitar leads through a Max patch.

Halstead mixed tracks one and seven and Shawn Everett the rest, with Heba Kadry mastering. Mixing in Los Angeles with Everett made the drums dirtier sounding, Halstead said. Kisses was the lead single in June 2023, followed by Skin in the Game, The Slab and Alife. The album reached the top ten in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, and holds a Metacritic score of 82 from 20 reviews. Pitchfork's Jayson Greene called the music wispier and more skeletal, and the closest the band had come since reforming to the sound of Souvlaki, darkened by age. The Guardian ranked it 45th among the albums of 2023, and The Quietus's Irina Shtreis found it more immediate and transparent than its predecessor.