We Used to Wait

It was released on 1 August 2010 as the first UK single from The Suburbs, while "Ready to Start" was the first in the US. Craig Silvey mixed it through vintage analog consoles in Montreal and New York. He found it hard because the premix had more than thirty tracks and three drum kits.

The song was used in The Wilderness Downtown, an interactive video by Google Creative Lab and Chris Milk that showed off HTML5 and the Chrome browser. Time listed it among the 30 all-time best music videos in July 2011, and it was one of three Grand Prix winners in the Cyber category at Cannes in 2011. Viewers' virtual postcards were used as background visuals during The Suburbs tour.

Rolling Stone named it the fifth best song of 2010, and Paste put it eleventh among the 15 best Arcade Fire songs in 2017. Live, the band used a screen showing a radio exchange between the Butlers' grandfather Alvino Rey and a Canadian operator. Mark Ronson and Business Intl covered it on Jo Whiley's BBC Radio 1 show on 20 October 2010, and The Drums also covered it.