Somebody That I Used to Know

The song is an argument, and you have been taking the wrong side

Nearly everyone who has sung along to "Somebody That I Used to Know" has sung the man's part. That is the part with the hook, the famous cracked falsetto, the line everybody can do at karaoke. It is also the part written to be wrong.

The structure is the whole point. For roughly two minutes you hear a single voice describing the end of a relationship in a tone of restrained injury: he was unhappy, she changed, she cut him off, and the final insult was being filed away as a stranger. It is persuasive because almost everyone has told a version of that story about someone. Then the arrangement drops out, a second voice enters, and the woman gets her turn — and she does not simply disagree. She points out that he has edited the history. She describes being kept at arm's length, being blamed for his own unhappiness, and then being discarded with no explanation and no contact at all.

It is a rare thing in pop music. Most duets are a conversation between two people who want the same thing. This one is a cross-examination. The man's complaint and the woman's rebuttal cannot both be true, and the song never tells you which to believe — it just lets you sit with the fact that you had already made up your mind before you had heard both parties.

That is why it stuck. A catchy sample and a famous falsetto got it onto the radio. The structural ambush is why it stayed.

Background: a Belgian-born Australian, a barn, and a crate of old records

Gotye is Wally De Backer, and the name is an approximation of Gauthier — the French form of Walter, the name his Belgian family would have used for him. He was born in Bruges in 1980 and brought to Australia as a toddler, growing up in the Melbourne suburbs as a Flemish kid with an unpronounceable surname, a detail he has spoken about over the years as shaping his outsider streak.

He came up the slow way. He drummed and sang in a Melbourne band called The Basics, and he built his solo work out of samples hunted down in charity shops and op shops — not fashionable breakbeats but the discarded easy-listening, exotica and library records nobody else wanted. His early albums were assembled from these fragments, which is useful context for what happens on this song: Gotye's instinct was never to write at a piano, it was to find a sound and build a world around it.

The world here comes from Brazil. The nylon-string guitar figure that loops through the entire track is a sample of "Seville" by Luiz Bonfá, the Brazilian guitarist who helped invent bossa nova and co-wrote the music for Black Orpheus. Bonfá recorded it in the 1960s as a gentle, sunlit miniature. Lifted out of its context and put on repeat, the same phrase becomes something else entirely — nervous, circling, slightly claustrophobic, like a thought you cannot stop having. Bonfá, who died in 2001, is credited as a co-writer.

Most of the record around that loop was made at home, in a converted barn or shed on his parents' property on the Mornington Peninsula, the stretch of coast and farmland south of Melbourne. The album that came out of it, Making Mirrors, is full of the same homemade resourcefulness — one of its other songs reportedly uses recordings of the Winton Musical Fence, a playable fence installed in outback Queensland. This was not a Los Angeles hit factory. It was a man with a hard drive, a pile of odd records and a lot of time.

He needed the time. By his own account the song was a grind: he reportedly wrestled with it for months, had the music and the sentiment but not the shape, and came close to abandoning it. The unlock was the idea of handing the second half to a woman and letting her tear the first half down.

For the second voice he called Kimbra — Kimbra Lee Johnson, a New Zealander from Hamilton who had moved to Melbourne and was, at that point, barely known outside Australian music circles. She delivers the rebuttal with a precision that is almost unsettling: controlled, reasonable, more in sorrow than in fury, which makes it land far harder than shouting would.

The video did the rest. Directed by Natasha Pincus, it is essentially one slow pull-back: the two singers naked against a painted wall, their bodies gradually covered in the same geometric pattern by stop-motion body art, the work of Australian body painter Emma Hack. The backdrop was reportedly painted by Gotye's own father. The visual idea is exact — two people camouflaged into the same surface, indistinguishable from the scenery of their own shared history, and then slowly separating from it.

What the lyric is actually doing

Take the two halves apart and the craft becomes obvious.

The man's verses move through a very recognisable sequence. First, a concession: the relationship had been unhappy for a while, and he admits he found a kind of relief in it ending. Then the self-flattery creeps in — he casts himself as the one who was mature about it, who took the lesson, who was reasonable. Then the grievance arrives, and the reasonableness evaporates. He accuses her of needing to make the separation absolute: friends recruited to her side, belongings returned, his number deleted, every trace of him removed. And the wound at the centre of it is semantic rather than physical. What undoes him is being demoted in her vocabulary — reduced from the person who knew her best to a name she uses in the past tense. That is the title, and it is a brilliant choice, because the phrase is so bland. It is the kind of thing you say at a party without thinking. The song's insight is that a phrase that mild can be the cruellest thing you will ever be called.

Then he escalates, and the music escalates with him, and his voice gives out into that strained upper register. Listen closely and the performance is not heartbreak. It is self-pity curdling into accusation.

Kimbra's verse answers it point by point, which is what makes it an argument rather than a counter-mood. She describes being told, in effect, that the fault was hers — that his unhappiness was something she had caused. She describes affection that ran hot and cold. And then she describes the ending as he actually executed it: a clean, total severing, no conversation, no contact. Her implication is devastating and simple. He has stood here complaining that she treated him like a stranger when he was the one who made that decision.

The genius is the sequencing. Had their verses been reversed, it would be a song about a man getting what he deserved. Placed this way, the listener is made complicit. You believed him. You sang his part.

Gotye has described the song in interviews as drawing on his own relationships and on watching how people narrate their breakups to themselves, and he has been notably unwilling to assign a villain. The most honest reading is that both of them are telling the truth as they remember it, and that memory after a breakup is not a record but a defence case.

How a homemade Australian track became the song of 2012

The chronology still looks implausible. The single came out in Australia in July 2011, went to number one there, and won the Triple J Hottest 100 for that year — a national listener poll that functions in Australia as a kind of annual referendum on taste. At that stage it was a local phenomenon by an artist with no international profile.

Then it crossed the water, and in early 2012 it went everywhere: number one in more than twenty countries, eight weeks on top of the American Billboard Hot 100, five weeks at number one in the UK, and one of the biggest-selling singles of the year on both sides of the Atlantic. At the 2013 Grammys it won Record of the Year and Best Pop Duo/Group Performance, with Making Mirrors taking Best Alternative Music Album.

For British listeners the song arrived at a strange moment. UK charts in early 2012 were dominated by big, polished, four-to-the-floor pop, and into that came a track built on a 1960s Brazilian guitar sample, recorded in a shed on the other side of the planet, whose emotional climax is a man's voice breaking. It had no obvious business being a number one. Its success was taken at the time as evidence that the download-and-YouTube era had loosened the gatekeepers' grip — a song could now go global because people kept sending it to each other.

They sent the covers too. A Canadian band called Walk off the Earth filmed five people playing a single guitar at once and racked up a staggering view count; the song turned up on Glee; parody versions and cover versions multiplied until Gotye made a piece of his own, a mashup stitched together from fan uploads, as a sort of affectionate acknowledgement of the swarm. Kimbra, meanwhile, went from near-unknown to a Grammy winner in about eighteen months.

And then Gotye did the thing almost nobody does. He stepped away. He went back to drumming in The Basics, dug into the obscure electronic instrument history he actually cared about — including championing the Ondioline, a strange mid-century keyboard associated with the French composer Jean-Jacques Perrey — and has released no follow-up Gotye album in the years since. He has reportedly said he has no interest in manufacturing another hit, and he has been quite open about how uncomfortable the scale of the fame was. The song about being reduced to a stranger made its author famous enough to become one.

Why it still resonates

The sound of 2012 has dated, as all production does. The idea at the centre of this song has not aged a day, because it is not about a relationship. It is about how we tell stories about relationships.

Everyone has a version of the man's verse ready to go. We have all described an ex in terms that quietly position us as the reasonable party, and we have all been on the other end of someone else's edited account of us. What the song does is play that instinct back with the other side attached, which almost never happens in life. You do not usually get to hear the rebuttal. The song provides it, uninvited, in the last ninety seconds.

There is also something very modern in the specific injury it describes. The hurt is not infidelity or distance but erasure — the mutual friends who pick a side, the number deleted, the complete withdrawal of contact. That was already a familiar shape in 2011 and it has only become more so in an era where ending a relationship involves unfollowing, muting, blocking and the odd afterlife of a person continuing to exist on your screen while being formally gone from your life. The phrase in the title is now effectively a description of a settings change.

And then there is the voice. The arrangement is deliberately tiny at the start — the looping guitar, a little xylophone, almost nothing else — so that when the whole thing finally swells and his control fails, the crack carries real weight. That moment is why people replay it. It is the sound of composure losing, which is the actual sound of a breakup, and no amount of production polish has ever improved on it.

Thirteen years on, the test is simple. Put it on in a room of people who think they are sick of it, and watch how many of them still take the man's side.

How to dive deeper

🎧 Immerse in the sound

• Making Mirrors album — heard in sequence, the hit stops looking like a fluke and starts looking like the work of a serious sonic magpie. The album is full of homemade textures and borrowed instruments, and the big single is simply the one where everything lined up.
• Luiz Bonfá recordings — the Brazilian guitarist whose 1960s miniature became this song's spine. Hearing the original phrase in its warm, unhurried context is a lesson in how completely a sample can change a feeling.
• Kimbra Vows album — her own debut, released around the same moment, shows that the voice doing the rebuttal was never a guest vocalist in waiting. It is stranger and jazzier than the duet suggests.

📚 Follow the story

• Making Mirrors liner notes and interviews — Gotye has talked at length about the months he spent stuck on this song and the moment the two-narrator idea rescued it. The making-of is a better argument for patience than any songwriting manual.
• History of bossa nova book — the sample's origins run back to Rio in the late 1950s and a revolution in rhythm and guitar voicing. Knowing where that loop came from reframes the whole track.
• Australian music history book — Triple J, the Hottest 100 and a thriving local scene explain how a shed recording became a national number one before the rest of the world noticed. The Australian chapter of this story usually gets skipped.

🌍 Visit the places

• Mornington Peninsula travel guide — the coastal farmland south of Melbourne where the album was reportedly recorded in a converted barn on family land. Wineries, beaches and very little music-industry infrastructure, which was the point.
• Melbourne city guide — the city that produced both halves of the duet's circle, from pub bands to community radio. It remains one of the most rewarding live-music cities anywhere.
• Winton, Queensland — home of the Musical Fence, the playable outback installation reportedly recorded for another song on the same album. It is a genuinely odd pilgrimage for anyone curious about where Gotye looks for sounds.

🎸 Experience it yourself

• nylon-string classical guitar — the gentle, woody tone at the heart of the track comes from this instrument rather than a steel-string. Play a simple descending figure on one and the mood arrives immediately.
• xylophone or glockenspiel — those bright, childlike taps are what keep the verses feeling fragile instead of merely sparse. A cheap one teaches you how much space a single high note can hold open.
• sampler or looping software — the song is built on a repeated fragment, and constructing one yourself reveals the trick. Loop four bars of something old, sing over it, and notice how quickly repetition turns into anxiety.

🎵 Listen to this song