Bad Decisions

Album: Gameshow (2016)
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Songfacts®:

  • TDCC frontman Alex Trimble explained the inspiration behind this club-friendly track: "I discovered this term weltschmertz, the German word for being at odds with the world around you," he said. "The fact that it was a fully coined term made me feel it was okay to not exist on the same level as everyone else, it was okay to be comfortable doing your own thing."

    "Is your phone the last thing you look at before you go to sleep? Is it the first thing you reach for when you wake up? Tonight, turn it off and let your imagination send you to sleep," Trimble continued. "In the morning, get up, go outside and breathe in the new day's air. Trust us - you'll feel better."
  • We hear Alex Trimble claiming on the song he's "had enough of the information generation". He explained the lyric to The Guardian:

    "Over the years, I saw how affected some of the kids were that would come to shows. On Twitter, there would be a lot of fans that were aggressively excited. They'll say some of the most outrageous things, and I would recognize them at the shows – they're like a shell of how they exist online. They've no real social skills, there's no eye contact, they can't maintain a conversation. I see a whole generation that... it's kind of damning to say that they're ruined, but something to that effect. There's almost a schizophrenic thing happening where there is a fully-formed existence online that's so far removed from the real world."
  • The song's music video channels old school arcade games and was directed by the New Zealand duo of Sean Wallace and Jordan Dodson, aka Thunderlips. We see the band in an animated video game world, in which they advance through different levels
    .
    "When we first spoke to Alex on the set of 'Are We Ready?', it was clear that he hated social media as much as we did, so we knew we needed to come up with a suitably epic metaphor to illustrate this brilliant song," Thunderlips said.

    The directorial duo added that they drew initial inspiration from Dante's Inferno and adapted it to a video game as a "fun way to make this concept relevant and also give us a platform for the animators to develop and embellish with the band battling each other to escape hell and earn redemption."

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