It’s a good kind of punch to the stomach. It doesn’t leave you too winded afterwards. For us, this song is a little bit more uncomfortable, we wrote it at first. It’s a bit out of our comfort zone, but I think the more we lived with it, the more we fell in love with it, I think.

The writing process was unusual, because we thought this is like almost pastiche, we can push it, we just had a lot of fun with it. We didn’t really overthink it, didn’t really care about it at the start. And then six months later, the three of us were like ‘There’s something in this, this is a really great song. And we thought this could be the lead for our campaign.

We had so much time after the pandemic writing and when you have that time, you have a lot of time to experiment and we kind of landed on this slightly more electronic synth-heavy thing, quite riff- and rhythmically-orientated music and it was quite exciting for us, and I think, if you like it as a band, hopefully everyone else likes it as well. But we were just really invested in it at the time.

[Writing the song in the context of the album] was about halfway through, we were kind of messing with the idea of concepts, like, you start out with album four, so what is a rock band do? They go ‘concept’. So it’s very cliche, isn’t it? And then about halfway through, we wrote this sort of advertisement to this world that we’ve created, Dead Club City. You have to really like lead with this song, it’s the advertisement, it’s the sort of like the welcome to the place.

I think, when you’re writing, it’s, at least for us, we haven’t got our genre picked, or like an idea at all of what we wanna do. We just do it, see what comes out, and then few months later, you’re like ‘Oh, I really like the melodic structure of that’, or those synths that were used, or where we’re going lyrically and it’s like, it starts taking shape as you’re writing and we’re sort of like ‘Yeah’, and then we used these sort of similar themes throughout the album, throughout the writing we did after.

—via BBC Radio 1’s Future Sounds with Clara Amfo

Joe Langridge-Brown:

This is the advertisement for this world we’d created. We were like, ‘Can this be a single, because it’s so conceptual?’ I think that was a lesson in giving fans and listeners more respect, as in, ‘People are going to understand that this is a metaphor.’ You haven’t always got to hold the listeners' hands so tightly the whole way through a song and an album. As with a lot of the record, it’s a lot more sort of synth-based and widescreen, cinematic. That’s kind of how I hear a concept record, that sort of expanse—which really made sense with this city vibe. The riff after the intro changed massively in the studio. It had more of a Justice thing before, but then it turned into this Prince-style thing. With Conor [Mason, singer]’s vocal, as well, that was a big consideration. More ‘80s-style stuff is what we’re referencing a lot.

—via Apple Music