This sprawling tune lined with creeping synths was premiered on Zane Lowe's BBC Radio 1 show on January 7, 2014. Bassist Tom Fleming told NME: "We wanted people to think, 'S--- have I put the right record on?' It's a big sounding song about protecting what you've got and grabbing things by the balls."
The lyric, "In your mother tongue, what's the verb 'to suck'?" is a shot at British bands who are captivated with copying their American counterparts rather than pursuing their own ideas.
The band were horrified that the line was interpreted by some as an attack on Domino labelmates Arctic Monkeys. "I had to phone up the label to apologise and explain that I was not slagging off the flagship band," singer Hayden Thorpe told The Guardian. "Also, they're on the radio singing about settees in a Yorkshire accent; that's the home team!"
Vocalist Hayden Thorpe explained the song's meaning to DIY magazine: "It's a song about us as a band," he said. "It's a statement about our ideals, who we are as people and as a gang. It's almost a re-imagining of the initial things that threw us together when we were teenagers. We had these grievances, feelings of a power struggle, things we wanted to stomp all over."
The song is a mission statement for the band. "From the Stone Age to now, we judge our whole past by the culture people have left behind," Thorpe told NME. "'Wanderlust' is almost a kind of war cry, asking, is this the best we've got – kids singing in accents that aren't their own, singing about lives that aren't theirs, and reaping huge rewards from it?"
"So little is done with so much privilege – music is really a class thing, because if where I'm glad government that is making people pay £9000 a year for university, then it's only the rich kids who will get to arts and music school," continued Thorpe. "We're talking about such a small group of people who are gonna create work that is supposed to define all tell us what our lives are. It's a very scary prospect."
Fleming explained the meaning of the Present Tense album title to HMV.com . "This record is about playing with now, people's inability to live in the present and not either dwell on the past or obsess about the future," he said. "This record is about memory and trying not to long for things that either didn't happen or will never happen."
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