Songfacts®:

• This is the title track of Beartooth's sophomore album, which also begins the record. When we interviewed Beartooth's frontman, Caleb Shomo, he explained why he made those artistic choices. "I thought it was just the best word to describe the whole album in one word," he said about the title. "The song 'Aggressive' is kind of like an all-encompassing song of what's to come on the record. It's got the heavy parts. It's got all the choruses, and lyrically it's a bit more pissed off and in your face. I'm really happy with how it turned out. I think 'Aggressive' is just the best way to sum it up."
• Shomo described the album title and this song being about the "aggressive youth" in a 2016 interview with Loudwire. "Whether that be myself and me reflecting on times when I was younger or whether that be things going on in the world today," he said.
  
  He goes on to reveal how the music video embodies this song's meaning. "I think the video really was just a lot of visuals to represent that," he continued. "I mean, obviously with the black and white that's just an aesthetic thing to give it more grit and a darker tone and let people know that this is going to be an intense record. It also represents just doing whatever it takes to get where you need to get. For me, this record has a lot to do with me doing whatever it takes to pursue happiness and be comfortable with myself. So, yeah, I think the fact that it's a kid is just to bring some reality to the situation. All the stuff that's happening in the world right now definitely affects the youth, and it affects the younger generation a lot more than people would think sometimes."
• During Shomo's album commentary for Spotify in 2016, he expanded about the lyrical interpretation of this tune. "It's about a lot of the things going on in the world that are pretty impossible to ignore right now," he said. "Obviously, there's all this crazy stuff going on like politics, and I'm not even a political guy so the fact that I wrote stuff kind of loosely around that is pretty nuts to me already, but it's more about just what's going on in the world and how it's affecting our generation of kids. I think it has more of an affect than a lot of people know."