Too Many Friends

The song starts with the lyric, "My computer thinks I'm gay. I threw that piece of junk away." Frontman Brian Molko commented to Kerrang! magazine, laughing: "What a ridiculous way to open a song, right. It's such an ear-catching lyric, but it walks a fine line. I knew it was so out-there and ridiculous, people would love or hate it. That seemed to embody the spirit of Placebo really well, so it presented me with a conundrum: 'Can I do this? Do I have the balls to do this?' So I tried to be courageous and remain so." Molko added: "It actually happened to me one day. I don't know what I'd typed into Google, but my computer started advertising to me in a completely different way, and I just thought, 'Wow, my computer thinks I'm gay today.'"

The song's music video was shot on location in the hills above Los Angeles, on Mulholland Drive. The seven-minute clip, which merges death, drugs and depravity in the form of a poolside incident, was directed by Saman Keshavarz. American novelist and screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis, who is most known for is his 1991 novel, American Psycho, provided the voiceover. Bassist Stefan Olsdal told Bandwagon of the video: "I don't think it's a literal representation of the song, I think they work on parallel universe. They have certain things in common which are technology and social media and the kind of effect it has on our lives and there's a certain kind of miscommunication. Like the song is alluding you to, there's a whole thing about people being isolated but having more friends but these friends are virtual. So are you closer to the 500 virtual friends you have than the people you sit with having one to one conversation. I think it is dealing with what social media is doing to us."

This is the lead single from Placebo's seventh studio album, Loud Like Love, which is a collection of 10 love songs about different aspects of romance. Molko recalled to Vice in 2017: "There's love from different perspectives: obsession, desire, destruction. I reflected a little bit on that after the album came out, and then I realized that a lot of our songs from the past are love songs of a kind. They're just not the pop, generic, 'I love you, baby' love song. They explore other aspects of love."