Songfacts®:

• "Carnage" is Chase & Status' collaboration with British rapper Little Simz. Simz delivers a boastful verse about her style, her money, and her complete indifference to what people say about her. Her message is simple: when she arrives, things get chaotic.
• Chase & Status and Simz wrote the song with Alex Naim and Brendan "BREN" Grieve, who also co-produced it with the electronic duo. BREN is a British producer, songwriter, and bass player who toured with Sam Smith on the In the Lonely Hour tour before co-writing and producing tracks on Smith's 2017 album The Thrill of It All. His other credits include Teezo Touchdown's "I'm Just A Fan" and Latto's "Somebody."
• One of the track's most striking features is its choir-like backing vocal. Despite sounding as though a full choir was brought into the studio, that thick vocal layer is just Simz's voice tracked multiple times.
  
  Chase & Status initially played Simz some stripped-back hip-hop beats. When she asked what they were looking for, they told her to "keep it gangster." She responded by adding the layered, choir-like vocals, an unexpected move that initially left the producers puzzled. "We were like, 'Okay, that's kind of random,'" Status told BBC Radio 1 host Jack Saunders. That apparent randomness turned out to be precisely what the track needed.
• The duo recorded Simz's vocals on site, but the finished track evolved into something far removed from what she had originally laid down. "It was very different to what she recorded it on," Chase explained. "To the extent that we were like, she really might hate this. So we were in quite a lot of trepidation on this one, literally sitting on tenterhooks, thinking: is this going to be a reach too far this time with someone?"
• When Chase & Status tested the track in their DJ sets, the crowd's reaction convinced them they had a hit. "Okay," Chase remembered thinking, "I think we've got a big record here."
• "Carnage" appears as the third track on Generic Everything, Chase & Status' seventh album. The duo described the album as being about resisting the pressure to conform, a theme that fits a track whose entire attitude is to do things its own way and let everyone else deal with the noise.