Headphones

After calling off their summer 2016 Work This Body tour in the wake of singer Nick Petricca's father falling ill, Walk The Moon took a break for the first time in years. The band reconvened in October 2016 at a recording studio in Austin. This song opens with a blast of noise before segueing into high-energy, hooky rock. "That was the very first song that we wrote when we got back together in Austin," Petricca told Rolling Stone. "it just came out of us, this angry-boy energy."

This song was an important one for the band during the recording of What If Nothing as it inspired them to follow their instincts rather than creating another Talking Is Hard-esque record. Guitarist Eli Maiman told Billboard: "There was a moment early on [with] 'Headphones,' one of the first songs we wrote. And we had a demo of it and the question comes up: Is this Walk the Moon or is this The Walk the Moon? And the answer for us on this record was, who f--king cares? This is what's inside us and what's out will follow that. And that was the inspiration."

Petricca explained the song's meaning to Genius: "The lyric comes out of the idea of going mad with jealousy, of seeing a person you love getting a lot of attention from someone else, and that just getting in your veins and under your skin and in your brain, in your dreams, voices in your head, and that’s a fun place to write from actually. That’s the best part of being a musician, anything that sucks you can take that and put it in a song."