Songfacts®:

• "Living A Lie," the lead single from The Amazons' fourth album, 21st Century Fiction, is a new direction for the band - a little darker, a little more raw, and unafraid to lay its soul bare. They've chucked their old playbook into the bin, taken a deep breath, and plunged into uncharted waters.
  
  Frontman Matt Thomson told The Sun: "It's the song that kick-started a whole new era for us. There's a moment in Hemingway's A Moveable Feast where he talks about writer's block. He writes: 'All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.'
  
  Mine was 'I've been living a lie.' It's the first line I wrote for 21st Century Fiction."
• The song begins with a lone violin and the voice of singer-songwriter Ella McRobb drifting through the ether. It's a moment of calm before a storm of explosive basslines and jagged riffs. And explosive they are. "Living A Lie" dials up the energy and aggression that first put The Amazons on the map to seismic levels.
• Frontman Matt Thomson also takes a step into the unknown, both vocally and lyrically. Reflecting on the track, he described it as "an ode to staring at the ceiling in the early hours of the morning."
  
  You know the feeling: the stillness of 3 a.m. when little fibs we tell ourselves in the daytime morph into existential crises, and resolutions that feel monumental dissolve by dawn.
  
  "It's exposing and vulnerable," Thomson said. "Those moments when you tell yourself everything will change tomorrow - and it never does."
• The Amazons weren't aiming for this sound initially. "We were working on something entirely different," Thomson said. But "Living A Lie" took on a life of its own, channeling both the frustrations of the past and the apprehensions of what lies ahead.
• The song can be interpreted in several different ways. "It's that feeling of waking up at 3 a.m. or not being able to get to sleep," Thomson told NME. "The weight of the world, the stark, bleak realities of little lies that we tell ourselves to get through the day – when they're just exposed on their own, you see them for what they are. It's very exposing and vulnerable. I'm fascinated by the little resolutions that you make in the middle of the night, [saying] your life is going to change tomorrow – and it never does."
• The band's guitarist, Chris Alderton, co-produced the track alongside Pete Hutchings, who has also worked with Royal Blood, Gang of Youths, and Foals.