Newborn

Newborn first came out as the lead track of The Newborn EP on Ugly Man in August 2000. It then appeared on Asleep in the Back in May 2001 and was released as the album's third single that October, reaching 42 in the UK. Steve Osborne produced it, with Danton Supple engineering at Moles Studio in Bath and at Real World, and Ben Hillier mixed the album version at Parr Street in Liverpool. In a 2002 interview the band named Genesis's Entangled as an influence on the arrangement.

Garvey has called it a love song despite its dark images, and said it was complicated to write because the band were trying to imitate an orchestra. The AV Club heard the album's seven-and-a-half-minute centerpiece as also its most immediate track, with echoes of Peter Gabriel. The single's B-sides included One Thing That Was Bothering Me, Lucky with Disease and None One.

Live

Its first logged performance was at The Monarch in London on 22 August 2000, and setlist.fm counts 174 since, the most recent at Revolution Hall in Portland, Oregon, in October 2025. It was in the Glastonbury sets of 2004 and 2008. Garvey described it as an old friend that has stayed in the live set for all the years since its release. The upload in the hypersongs web is the official video, a 3:14 edit close to the length of the radio edit rather than the full album version.