Songfacts®:

• "Starless" finds A Perfect Circle looking out at a world that has misplaced its moral compass and then wonders who moved the furniture.
  
  The song takes aim at authoritarian power, with ideological corruption described as a "poison worm" burrowing beneath the skin. Maynard James Keenan presents us with an ugly choice: "yield and bend the knee" or become "the enemy."
• The word "starless" never appears in the lyrics. The title is metaphorical, suggesting a night sky without fixed points of reference. The stars represent the moral and truthful markers we use to navigate our lives. Take those away and we're left wandering around in the dark, which is generally considered an undesirable arrangement unless we can find the light switch.
• The title brings to mind King Crimson's "Starless," the epic closing track on their 1974 album Red (later covered by The Unthanks on their 2011 album Last). A Perfect Circle's song shares the title and a similar feeling of being directionless, but that's where the resemblance ends. King Crimson's "Starless" is a sprawling progressive-rock epic about personal despair, while A Perfect Circle's 2026 track is a compact, riff-driven rocker concerned with political and moral confusion.
• A Perfect Circle's two core members, guitarist Billy Howerdel and vocalist Maynard James Keenan, wrote "Starless." It continues a thread of anxious songwriting centered on authority and control that Keenan and Howerdel established on A Perfect Circle's 2018 album Eat the Elephant. "The Doomed," for example, inverts the Beatitudes to criticize a society favoring cruelty over compassion, while "Disillusioned" laments a public too disconnected and addicted to screens to unite. "Starless" builds on those themes, shifting from broader social commentary to the disoriented internal toll of living under "cold authority" and "fabricated darkness."
• Howerdel produced the track at his Lankershim Ranch Studio in Studio City, California, playing guitar, bass and background vocals as well. The drums were played by Josh Freese, who rejoined A Perfect Circle in late 2023 after a 12-year absence from the lineup.
• Howerdel described the track's origin as unusually spontaneous for the band: "Some songs get kicked around and massaged for years. But once in a while, one takes shape quickly, as if it had been there all along."
  
  In a later radio interview, he elaborated that the riff came together while watching TV with his family. "Somebody had to get up to use the bathroom or make popcorn, and I had all but four to six minutes to get this idea down... on a little practice amp or recording it on my phone," he said. "So, wasn't much time to overthink anything. Kind of just stream of consciousness kind of riff. That's the way it started at least."
• A Perfect Circle shadow-dropped "Starless" on May 27, 2026, with no advance promotion, releasing it just days before their first European and UK tour in nearly a decade began in London on June 3.
• The track received a limited-edition 7-inch vinyl release distributed through Revolver magazine. It sold out quickly and became a collector's item among fans.
• "Starless" gave A Perfect Circle their second #1 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Airplay chart, on the survey dated October 3, 2026. The gap since their first, "Weak and Powerless" in 2003, was 22 years and 11 months.
• A Perfect Circle released an official video for "Starless" incorporating footage from the song's live debut at O2 Academy Brixton in London on June 3, 2026. Jon Vulpine and Justin Jones filmed the clip.