Bigger Than Us

This is the first single by British alternative rock band White Lies, from their sophomore album Ritual. The song received its first airplay on Zane Lowe's BBC Radio 1 show on November 16, 2010. It was officially released in the U.K. on January 3, 2011 and as a download in North America on November 22, 2010.

White Lies drummer Jack Lawrence-Brown told Contactmusic.com about the song: "That was actually the second track we recorded in the studio. From our early demos it was one of the songs we were happy with the structure of and we wanted a great recorded version of it so we did it very early on in the session. We knew that it was a song that our label loved; it sounded like such a single [laughs]. I think we always knew it was the first single because it's the most radio-friendly song that we've ever written; it's got plenty of choruses [laughs]."

Lawrence-Brown told I Like Music about the song's music video, which was filmed in Romania: "Obviously it looks as though it is set in America, but we didn't have the budget to go there! We'd made three videos for the first album with the same director, a very good director and a guy we love dearly called Andreas Nelson. This time round the song was bigger and more ambitious than anything we've tried before, so we decided we should try something new. We searched all the treatments and found the most ambitious, slightly bonkers one and went with that. That was really our only aim; to do something ambitious that we hadn't tried. It's pissed people off and made people happy in equal measure. It's confused people and I think that's a good thing to do. Possibly quite a hard thing to do in this day and age, to surprise people with videos. So we were happy with it."