They Might Be Giants recently premiered an entire backwards version of one of their songs, and have titled it ‘Stilloob’. Essentially, the track is just one of their older cuts, ‘Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love’, put straight into reverse.

Many artists may claim to know their songs like the back of their hand, claiming that they know them “back to front” or other such things, but few bands could mean it as literally as They Might Be Giants. At a recent live appearance on their Flood 30th-anniversary tour, the absurdist rock outfit premiered a brand new song that they have titled ‘Stilloob’. The name is essentially the word Boollits put backwards.

The reason for this is because the track is ‘Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love’ set in complete reverse, and played backwards note-for-note.

Luckily for us, some fan footage has captured this song reversal in New Haven, CT on Thursday night. ‘Stilloob’ on its own, while it is a song in reverse, is still actually quite a poppy track, with shades of experimental bands we’ve grown to love such as Animal Collective, who often implement jumbled words in their tracks. In classic TMBG nature, they didn’t even explain to the audience that they were doing a track in reverse. They did, however, end the performance with moonwalking as a hint.

One Twitter user took the time to reverse “Stilloob”, and while the results don’t sound exactly like the original, it was close enough to agitate YouTube’s copyright bots. @MovingToTheSun wrote, “after reversing the video for YouTube, the copyright bots recognized the original song before I titled it.”

They Might Be Giants still have dozens of dates left on their Flood tour. Tickets are available here.

Below you can listen to ‘Stilloob’ by They Might Be Giants.

Listen to the original version by They Might Be Giants, titled ‘Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love’

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