Songfacts®:

• "Adriana Again" is a further evolution from the experimental streak that emerged on Elbow's Audio Vertigo album. Here, the motorik beat drives like a well-oiled machine, and the guitars channel a dose of Black Sabbath - heavy, dark, and just a bit ominous.
  
  "It's like we built a new vehicle with audio vertigo," said frontman Guy Garvey. "What we did with some trepidation in changing the sound for Audio Vertigo was so well received that we feel confident to keep pushing forward."
• The song is ostensibly about "Adriana," a mysterious old flame of Garvey's, though he admits she's a fictitious creation patched together from his past experiences. According to Garvey, bassist Pete Turner's riffing summoned memories of his youth spent underground haunting the bars below Manchester's streets, including The Temple of Convenience.
  
  "At one point," Garvey reminisced to NME, "I was dating a sculptor whose previous boyfriend was one of her tutors. Looking back, that was really out of order with a massive age gap. He engaged me in some kind of pseudo intellectual row; just flashing his degree at me in a room full of people."
  
  "It used to happen a lot," he continued. "I used to hang out with a lot of artists as well as musicians. I would feel self-conscious for not having gone to university, so perhaps indulged in these stupid bloody jousts. It made me giggle and I wanted to go back into it."
  
  Garvey added: "It was an exciting time as well because I was in the band and things were moving. Like the rest of the album, I'm exploring something that happened years ago rather than writing about how lovely my garden is or how pleased with my son's school report I am. That doesn't really tickle me as a songwriter, so I'm going back to my dinge-y past, dramatizing it, and making it more dinge-y in a lot of places."
  
  The Temple of Convenience is a former Victorian public toilet in the centre of Manchester. Garvey referenced it in the song Grounds for Divorce, with the line: "There's a hole in my neighborhood down which of late I cannot help but fall."
• A Stylophone is a very small synthesizer played with a stylus pen that is tapped on the keyboard. This song includes a Stylophone solo.
  
  "It's a great little instrument and a great way of finding strange melodies," Garvey said. "There's something really oddly Space 1999 about them. You can tune them, so you can bridge the gap between what you can achieve with a laptop and an orchestra. It's still a pocket version of the future!"
• Other notable songs that use a Stylophone include:
  
  "Space Oddity" by David Bowie (1969) - This was one of the earliest and most famous uses of the Stylophone in pop music.
  
  "Slip Away" by David Bowie (2002) - Bowie returned to using the instrument later in his career.
  
  "Pocket Calculator" by Kraftwerk (1981) - The song features the Stylophone prominently and ends with a Stylophone solo.
  
  "White Diamonds" by Friendly Fires (2008) - The chorus bass line is played on a Stylophone.
• The song's video is its own little enigma, too. No Elbow members appear; instead, it's a band of young musicians jamming in a rehearsal room, thrumming along to "Adriana Again" with a collective energy. When asked about who this mystery band might be, Garvey simply smirked, "They're a legitimate band, but we just thought we'd have some fun and see if anyone can work out who they are."