One Pure Thought

One of three songs on the album, with Hold On and Shake a Fist, that the band recorded live at The Strongroom and assembled afterwards. Dan Carey mixed it. PopMatters called it the album's most guitar-driven track, and Martin, who credits Doyle's guitar, described it as classic pop. Goddard said at the time that the band had always wanted to be a real live band, mixing live guitar and piano with drum machines.

Released as the third single on 12 May 2008, it reached 53 in Britain and eleven in Scotland. The Guardian picked out its opening guitar chords, Pitchfork called it infectious, AllMusic heard early New Order in the melody, and Treble wrote that it soon explodes into full synth-pop. Tiny Mix Tapes and Boomkat were less convinced. Dominik Eulberg remixed it for the single, and the string quartet Geese turned it into something the band called stranger and dreamier for the EP they made with Robert Wyatt.

Video and live

The video was directed by Bevis Martin, Felix Martin's brother, and Charlie Youle, who had made T-shirts and sleeves for the band before, and animated by Trunk. It puts an animated band in a pointillist world of simple geometric shapes, built partly from things the pair found in charity shops and car boot sales. The song was first played at the 9:30 Club in Washington on 21 April 2007, and setlist.fm logs 75 performances, most of them in 2008 and 2010. It was fifth in the set at Glastonbury in 2008 and has not been logged since the SOMA festival in Bogotá in November 2010. The upload in the hypersongs web is the official animated video by Bevis Martin and Charlie Youle.