Wait

"Wait" is track five of the first disc of Hurry Up, We're Dreaming, 5:43, recorded in 2011 and the fifth and final single, released on Mute on December 5, 2012, the same day as its video. Wikipedia credits Anthony Gonzalez, Brad Laner, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Morgan Kibby and Yann Gonzalez; MusicBrainz lists only three, and the album credits additional lyrics to Yann Gonzalez, Kibby and Laner without a per-track split. The Boston Globe's review said it works as a blueprint for the entire album, softly ambient and then building to a peak. We found no statement from Gonzalez on its meaning.

The video, directed by Fleur and Manu in Paris and supported by The Creators Project, is the third part of a trilogy after "Midnight City" and "Reunion". It shows a mirrored tetrahedron carrying sleeping escaped children, and the psychic child from "Reunion" in an apocalyptic city with white wolves, who falls into a rainforest. Spin's Marc Hogan called it majestically evocative even if we still aren't quite sure what it means. In France it peaked at 154 in 2015, and it went gold in Italy, platinum in New Zealand and silver in the UK.

After release

The Ringer's Ian Cohen writes that it did not catch on until Josh Boone used it in The Fault in Our Stars in 2014, and a 2015 Bose advertisement used it for a teenager's first kiss. It has also appeared in Gossip Girl, Revenge, Step Up Revolution, The Vampire Diaries, Five Feet Apart and the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season-three finale. Kygo's free remix of April 2014 was issued officially in a 2024 edit on his album Kygo. A 2018 ballet used the album.

Setlist.fm counts 220 setlists with "Wait" out of 534, the sixth most played, behind "We Own the Sky", "Midnight City" and "Couleurs". At O2 Academy Brixton on November 8, 2012 it was the eighth song, between "Steve McQueen" and "Graveyard Girl". We could not tell which version our upload is, and found no covers or samples.