For a moment there, it seemed like Everything Was Beautiful might never exist. In 2018, Jason Pierce returned with the eighth Spiritualized album, And Nothing Hurt. It was his first in six years, and he promptly spent its rollout saying it could very well be the last. Artists sometimes say stuff like that, and it’s easy to brush it off. But when I interviewed him that summer, I believed him. He had made another great Spiritualized album, but a smaller one — an album that seemed fractured and weathered and, after speaking to him, an extension of a very exhausted and drained headspace. He spent most of that conversation dwelling on what the album was supposed to be — louder, more expansive — and then on the fact he couldn’t seem to find a positive thing to say about the painstaking process of crafting it at home.