world. "Somebody That I Used to Know" has been performed several times on major US TV shows such as The Voice, American Idol, and Saturday Night Live. The hit song's YouTube video was directed by Australian artist Natasha Pincus. The video, which has received over 2 billion views on YouTube as of November 2022, premiered on 5 July 2011. It shows Gotye and Kimbra naked against a white backdrop. While they sing, a pattern of paint gradually covers their skin and the backdrop via stop motion animation. Composition and recording Gotye discussed writing "Somebody That I Used to Know" in an interview with Sound on Sound: "Somebody That I Used to Know" is a mid-tempo art pop song and has a length of four minutes and five seconds. Gotye uses a sample of Brazilian jazz guitarist Luiz Bonfá's 1967 instrumental song "Seville", with additional instrumentations of beats and a xylophone playing a melody based on Baa, Baa, Black Sheep. It was written and produced by Gotye himself, while in his parents' barn on the Mornington Peninsula, Victoria. Gotye commented that he wrote the song "in quite a linear way", explaining that "I wrote the first verse, the second verse, and I'd got to the end of the first chorus and for the first time ever I thought, 'There's no interesting way to add to this guy's story'. It felt weak." The track was recorded between January and May 2011 with Gotye struggling to find a suitable female vocalist, as a "'high profile' female vocalist" cancelled the collaboration at the last minute, and Kimbra "lucked out as the replacement". He tested his girlfriend, Tash Parker, but "somehow their happiness meant that it didn't work out" so he followed the recommendation of the song's mixer and used Kimbra's vocals. Martin Davies from Click Music considered the song "instantly captivating", and named Kimbra's voice "clean and sugar-soaked", further commenting that it bears an "uncanny resemblance" to singer Katy Perry. Gotye stated that the song was "definitely drawn from various experiences I've had in relationships breaking up, and in the parts of the more reflective parts of the song, in the aftermath and the memory of those different relationships and what they were and how they broke up and what's going on in everyone's minds. Yeah, so it's an amalgam of different feelings but not completely made up as such." In an interview with