Spiralling

Spiralling opens Perfect Symmetry and was its lead single. Rice-Oxley told Q it was his favorite track on the album, an excessive 80s groove. Its main riff is played on guitar, though he said it was a strange sound for any guitarist, and uDiscover heard brassy, disco-style 1980s fanfares. He said it was never meant as a single, but it went out first because it had defined the whole creative process of the record.

Chaplin described it as "a train of thought about human endeavour, built on an outrageous groove". Rice-Oxley said it was about the gap between what people dream of becoming and what they actually achieve. The lyric draws on Book X of Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which Pygmalion falls in love with his own statue, and Rice-Oxley had studied Classics at UCL. A message on the band's website put it plainly: when we fall in love, we are only falling in love with ourselves.

Given away from the band's website for a week in August 2008, it passed 500,000 downloads in under a week, the fastest-downloading song Universal had seen, and was the most broadcast song in the world in its first week. On sale it climbed to 23 in the UK, twice, spent ten weeks in the Top 40 and became their ninth top-40 single in a row. It won Best Track at the Q Awards on 6 October 2008. PopMatters' John Bergstrom found it so awful it was almost fun, but in 2013 Drowned in Sound's Christopher McBride counted it among the great pop singles of the previous five years.

Video

The video premiered on the band's website in September 2008. It cuts between robots walking in a way that recalls the film I, Robot, Chaplin on a couch staring at TV sets, and Chaplin singing in a blue room. Rice-Oxley said it set an idealized dream against the dystopian reality of human existence.

Live and covers

setlist.fm logs 373 performances, and it was still in the set in 2024 and 2025. A performance from Later... with Jools Holland appears on the BBC compilation Later... Live with Jools Holland 2. Sugababes sang an acoustic version in BBC Radio 1's Live Lounge in October 2008, and their recording became the B-side of No Can Do. Diplo remixed it as the Mad Spirals Mix, which appeared on an American promo 7-inch. The upload in the hypersongs web is the official music video.