After Paper Anthem's third record—2021's not-COVID-album-COVID-album 'The Year You'll Never Get Back'—frontman Joseph Hitchcock felt it heralded the end of an era (begun in 2015 with debut album 'By Ghosts'), and a geographical relocation. The success of that album—and its anthemically dejected predecessor 'To All the Sailors We've Lost'—allowed the American-born songwriter a move to London, home to countless bands who inspired his sound, to form a new band under the same name and continue the project. Enter Romanian bassist Carlo Haltrich, Nottinghamian drummer Joe Spoors, and Lebanese guitarist Noor Harajli, each bringing a new level of passion and proficiency to Hitchcock's songwriting.

“Gameplan is me analyzing my own need for romantic companionship as I find myself in yet another cycle of painful courtship,” Hitchcock explains. Gameplan was produced by Danny Monk (Foals, Florence and the Machine, Daughter) at his studio near Baker Street, before being mixed by regular collaborator Brett Shaw at 123 Studios in Peckham. “Danny was a substitute engineer we met at 123, as Brett can’t work on weekends, but we got on with him so well that we just wanted to keep producing with him too,” Hitchcock adds. “Our next album will be pretty much evenly split between Danny Monk and Brett Shaw tracks.”

Says bassist Carlo Haltrich: “This is a very unique song for us—for me, personally—because it’s the first Paper Anthem song to have a bass solo.” Haltrich laughs as Hitchcock interjects: “Well, it’s also the first Paper Anthem song to have a guitar solo, too.” “Is it really?” Haltrich asks, before continuing sarcastically: “Well, we made sure to introduce both at the same time so you can’t hear the bass underneath.”

Drummer Joe Spoors remembers: “I forgot that we’d written the song until we went to rehearse it like literally two hours later, and [Joseph] explained to me that we had just written the song, and you played me the drums we’d written … and then we went to the studio the next day and recorded it. And so other than me forgetting the song entirely because I was so sleep deprived, it was the most prepared we’d been on a song. I don’t think it needed much tweaking after we got the parts down.”

“We had, like, ten takes or something,” Haltrich continues, “And we kept getting it wrong. I swear, it was the only song where I just couldn’t play it all the way through.” Hitchcock adds, “Danny was really pushing us to record it live as a band, but because we had just written it and I’m a massive, insufferable perfectionist, we kept tweaking parts and doing it again. It took us three separate productions of the song before it was done, and we ended up overdubbing my guitars again anyway. And Noor [rhythm guitar] had just joined the band days prior, and the last day working on Gameplan was our first day ever in the studio with her.”

“I really wanted everyone in the band to clap on all the snares,” says Hitchcock. “But Danny in his good taste restrained it to just the choruses.” “I did remote clapping,” adds Haltrich, who couldn’t be there that day. “I hid myself in my wardrobe covered in clothes and recorded [my] clapping separately.”

“I’m so proud of the lyrics here,” Hitchcock says. “This song is quite new, written this summer in Cantelowes Gardens, in Camden. I remember when the lyrics for the chorus came out of my mouth for the first time, in a state of improvisation… ‘I just want to feel like I’m your best, but I feel like less’, and I heard that come out of my mouth, and, finally realising how I’d been feeling lately without processing it properly, I just started crying right then and there.”