Songfacts®:

• Written by Middle Kids bass player Tim Fitz and lead singer Hannah Joy, "Bad Neighbours" is a very personal song for Joy, who confronts a childhood trauma on the track.
  
  "It's a vulnerable moment on the record," she told The Guardian. "I have often felt like I can't break free from defining moments in my past, and it is easy to think that the wounds will never heal."
• "Bad Neighbours" is the first song on the second Middle Kids album, Today We're The Greatest. The band broke through in 2016 with their single "Edge Of Town" and released their debut album, Lost Friends, in 2018. The lyrics on Lost Friends were mostly stories Joy contrived, but she decided to get personal on Today We're The Greatest. She was feeling particularly reflective while making the album because she was pregnant with her first child.
• A key line in this song is "Just when I'm breaking free I can't quite hold it all together." Hannah Joy explained it to The Guardian: "As we grow older, you start seeing how experiences when you're younger can have such a formative impact on you, and it's like gosh, I should be over this, or I should be healed. But some things in life you've just got to keep working through."
• Middle Kids formed in Sydney, Australia, which explains the spelling of "Neighbours" (also the name of a popular Australian soap opera that starred Kylie Minogue).
• With just acoustic guitar and strings, this song is a musical outlier on the album. The other songs have a harder edge with more layers of instrumentation.