Songfacts®:

• Wild Beasts close their Present Tense album with this ballad that uses the metaphor of buildings for love as Hayden Thorpe sings of finding beauty in perfection. "'Palace' is about acceptance," he explained to DIY magazine. "The closing line is perfect in that it admits that striving for perfection is the wrong cause. If you go for this, you miss all the beauty of the awkward, the ugly and the accidental."
  
  "There's an acceptance of the chaos; living with it and accepting it," Thorpe continued. "Early on, we always wanted 'Palace' to be the closing track." It has this air of cautious optimism. The line 'this is a palace and that was a squat' came from the realisation that I was one of many people that thinks achieving something automatically makes you a happier, better person. There's a mid twenties realisation that all of this is nonsense and counts for nothing. It's crushing. I had a realisation that I had everything I wanted, but I was living in a basement flat in Hackney; essentially a wreck. And I was paying a decent amount of rent for that. But there was an acceptance that I wouldn't change that for the world. I've lived in far prettier flats and they felt like squats. And this basement flat felt like a palace at that point."
• Bassist Tom Fleming commented to NME: "It's a straightforward song and I like having a really big, bright song at the end."