Popular

This song takes place in high school, where the clique system is firmly in place and students are desperately trying to fit in. The singer is one of the fortunate ones, as he is "popular."

The verses are all in spoken-word form, and come Penny's Guide To Teen-Age Charm And Popularity, an etiquette book for teenage girls that was published in 1964. Frontman Matthew Caws bought it at a Salvation Army. "I was listening to a lot of Sonic Youth and I was playing around with those chords at the beginning of the song trying to cop a little bit of their chord style, which I’m sure I didn’t do successfully," he told the magazine Motif. "So I was playing around with a 4-track and I had this little hook and I thought I would write a chorus from the standpoint of somebody who really believed everything in this book and someone who approached life like that in a very competitive way."

The video was shot at Bayonne High School in New Jersey, which is also where Mariah Carey's "Someday" and Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" were shot. In the video, all the kids are either cheerleaders or football players - the popular kids. At the end of the clip, there is a lot of snogging and two football players are shown smiling at each other in the shower. This created some controversy as the principal of the school objected to the sexual themes. Many thought the shower scene was supposed to portray the football players as gay, but the band claims they were meant to be bragging about their conquests.