Songfacts®:

• This is the title track of the fifth studio album to be released by indie rock band Metric. In a letter posted on the band's website, singer Emily Haines explained, "Synthetica is about staying home and wanting to crawl out of your skin from the lack of external stimulation… about forcing yourself to confront what you see in the mirror… about being able to identify the original in a long line of reproductions. It's about what is real vs. what is artificial."
• The album's sound was partially inspired by a radical Italian '60s architecture firm Superstudio, whilst its artwork was created by Toronto-based photographer and designer Justin Broadbent. According to Haines, Broadbent succeeded in channelling the strange architecture that inspired the band while making the new album. "We wanted the artwork for Synthetica to be thought provoking and a little disorienting, an optical illusion which asks you to stop for a moment and consider what you are looking at," said the singer. "We were very influenced by images from the radical architecture movement of the 1960s, and Justin's representation of the natural world seen through a physically impossible window - or is it a stage? - struck us immediately as the right cover for this album."