Songfacts®:

• Yeasayer are an experimental rock trio comprising keyboardist/vocalist Chris Keating, guitarist Anand Wilder, and bassist Ira Wolf Tuton. Keating and Wilder both grew up in Baltimore and after arriving at the University of Pennsylvania and hooked up with Anand's cousin, Tuton, who is from Philadelphia. The trio later relocated to Brooklyn, New York where they are now based.
• This is the opening track from Yeasayer's second album, Odd Blood, which is the follow-up to 2007's All Hour Cymbals. Keating told MTV News: "We were pretty determined to have it first on the record. I like the idea of starting the record like that, as a departure point from the last record, especially the last song on the last record, which was very choral, and then all of a sudden, you're transported to further into the future, and you're on some off-world colony that has crazy percussion and slowed-down vocals. We sang harmonies through a fan, sang into the pitch thing and tried to sing it live."
• Wilder told Drowned In Sound about the song: "That one was deliberately a palette cleanser from the last era of Yeasayer, we're reversing expectations, you know? We used to have tonnes of organic vocals, now we have one lead vocal being processed by a machine, a digital vocal peddle. The song was really written by Chris [Keating], and we added the production to it; we really wanted to get the sound of this futuristic, Orwellian work camp and the noises that you hear at prison camps. So there's a pick axe hit and it's actually a guitar, I'd be hitting a guitar with a drumstick 'plink!' to make that interesting sound. The whole track was slowed down half speed, that's how we get such a subby sound."