This is the opening track of Vulnicura, which was originally scheduled to be dropped in March 2015, but was released on iTunes two months early following an internet leak.
Vulnicura reflects on Bjork's 2013 breakup with the artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney, with whom she had a daughter, Isadora, in 2002. The lyrics booklet that accompanies the album on iTunes creates a rough timeline of the split. This song is annotated as "9 months before."
Speaking to Pitchfork, Bjork said that the separation from Barney was "the most painful thing" she had ever experienced. "When I did this album it all just collapsed. I didn't have anything," she commented. "It was the most painful thing I ever experienced in my life. The only way I could deal with that was to start writing for strings; I decided to become a violin nerd and arrange everything for 15 strings and take a step further than what I've done before." Bjork went on to say that the subject of the breakup was difficult to open up about, but that the album's lyrics tell the full story. "It's really hard for me to talk about it," she said. "It really is in the lyrics. I've never really done lyrics like this, because they're so teenage, so simple. I wrote them really quickly. But I also spent a long time on them to get them just right. It's so hard to talk about the subject matter; it's impossible — I'm sorry. There's so many songs about [heartbreak] that exist this in the world, because music is somehow the perfect medium to express something like this."
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