"survivin'" arrives after July's Graham Coxon collaboration "WHAT YOU GONNA DO???", and was originally intended to be a song about the highs and lows of Bastille’s seven years as a band, but then COVID-19 happened.
Lead vocalist Dan Smith explains, "There’d been times when I felt like I’d been in a washing machine and on a conveyor belt at the same time, but when people asked me how I was doing, the answer was always the British cliché: 'Yep, all good, fine'."
He adds, "At the start of lockdown I felt very self-conscious about having written a song that felt relevant when it wasn’t intended to be, but then I also think 2020 is the year we all stopped pretending everything’s fine."