Anti-D

Album: This Modern Glitch (2011)
Charted: 42
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Songfacts®:

  • Lead Wombat Matthew "Murph" Murphy has suffered with anxiety and depression since he was a teenager. But it wasn't until he started to have severe panic attacks at university that he was prescribed antidepressants to deal with it. The drug initially helped Murphy to control his anxieties but he grew increasingly concerned that they were only masking his problems. After the Wombats had finished touring their debut album, and Murphy found himself back in the studio, he realized his creativity was being severely hampered. As the anti-depressants were also causing other side effects, such as a numbing of emotions and loss of libido he decided to come off the medication. This song chronicles the struggles of the ensuing few weeks after Murphy stopped taking the drug. Murphy told The Guardian that surprisingly it was one of the easier tracks on This Modern Glitch to compose: "It kind of fell out of me. I was in Barcelona, coming off the drugs and I felt horrendous: really woeful and dizzy," he said.
  • The song's serious subject matter appears to be at odds with much of The Wombats' happy-go-lucky material. Murph told the The Sun: "It's actually a very positive song. It's a personal thing in my life, but of course I chose to put it into words and music to get it out. I don't know how that fits into our band, but I guess it's why I never thought we were that carefree band some people have implied we are."
  • Murphy admitted to The Guardian to finding it hard to play the song live. "But you have to stay as strong as possible," he smiled. "No one wants to see someone singing a song about anti-depressants burst out crying."
  • Drummer Dan Haggis told the Nottingham student publication Impact Magazine, that musically the song differs from anything else the band have recorded: He said: "Basically, as it gets to the end it gets more and more epic, and we've never had a song that goes epic, but we're all big fans of Sigur Ros and that side of music, which is really intense and builds and builds: and we've managed to work it into a Wombats song."

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