“O.N.E.” (pronounced “one night everywhere”) is a microtonal rock song that reflects on humanity’s effects on the natural world and the seemingly unending stream of bad news that comes with modern life. It describes the process of someone waking up knowing that they’ll soon hear some horrific new information. They proceed to read about the world for hours while feeling like they’re going insane, but they argue that maybe humanity deserves this torture for killing all of the different animals on Earth for our own desires.
Despite the song’s dark and helpless lyrics, “O.N.E.” is a colorful rock song. It starts with a slow section led by keyboard, chimes and calm vocals from Stu, before leading into a distorted and driving track with sitar, flute and other unique instrumentation.
The band released a demo of the song on Demos Vol. 5: Music To Think Existentially To. This version is a quiet, keyboard-only take on the song’s intro with a different chord progression than the studio version. The final studio version was played by Ambrose (vocals/percussion/harmonica/keyboards), Cavs (drums/percussion), Cook (guitar/synthesizer), Joey (guitar) and Stu (vocals/guitar/bass/electric piano/Wurlitzer/flute/marimba/synthesizer/sitar). It was recorded and mixed by Stu, and co-recorded by Cavs. It was released as the second song on L.W. on February 26th. 2021.
On January 18th, 2021, the band uploaded a still of a claymation Joey playing guitar. The following day a photo of Ambrose playing percussion on paper was posted. On the 26th the band announced a new song and gave dates and times for its drop. Alex McLaren’s music video for “O.N.E.” would be released on January 28th, 2021 alongside a single. The video constantly pans past various scenes while the band performs the song over footage that makes use of mystimation, claymation and video shot by Ambrose during lockdown. McLaren said “I felt the mix of stop motion and collage through the use of found imagery and the band would help compliment the tracks lyrics and themes as I interpreted them, of dreams, nightmares, climate change, dystopias, and utopias, as well as referencing events that took place during the making of the video over 2020.” This was McLaren’s first time working for the band and he would return for “Kepler-22b” a year later.
“O.N.E.” made its live debut on 2021-02-24 at the Croxton Park Hotel in Naarm (Melbourne) and would be played at many of that year’s microtonal shows. The song was played alone but also saw use in jams, such as on 2021-02-26 where the song connects to “Ontology.” This practice continued into 2022 where the song was in the band’s regular repertoire, sometimes gaining the intro of “Straws in the Wind” rather than its typical slow burn. By 2023 the song had become less common but was still in the band’s lineup.