Songfacts®:

• Chvrches released "Over" on February 24, 2023, as their first new song since their 2021 album Screen Violence. Written during the pandemic, that record was downbeat, with songs addressing feelings of loneliness, disillusionment, and fear, among other emotions. This tune is lighter and poppier; the band says it serves as "a brief reprieve from the horrors of CHV4."
• During an interview with Apple Music, Lauren Mayberry explained that she and her bandmates typically gather songs over the course of months or years to create an album's worth of material, but this time around, they wanted to release something they were enthusiastic about and provide their fans with new music to commemorate the end of the Screen Violence era and the beginning of the next Chvrches chapter. "Our music has always been about that balance between the dark and the light," she added, "and it felt like it had been a while since we'd turned the pop dial all the way up and had fun with that."
• Lyrically, the song finds Mayberry amid an unspecified crisis. She wishes it were all a dream and somebody would wake her up when it's over. According to Chvrches, the song "explores themes of trying to exist in an escapist dreamscape when life is difficult." They added the release "felt timely" in the light of recent global events.
• Chvrches went through multiple revisions of the lyrics for "Over" because of the intense emotions they experienced while creating it. Speaking on LA radio station KROQ, Mayberry noted that the sonic feel of the song had a classic quality, which led them to write a more narrative-style lyric than their usual approach. Mayberry admitted that she initially made the lyrics too dark, similar to the tone of Screen Violence. During the collaborative process, the band decided against including a line about drinking bleach, as it didn't fit with the song's overall theme. Mayberry acknowledged that sometimes songwriting comes naturally, but other times it takes several revisions to find the right fit.
• Chvrches wrote "Over" with producer Oscar Holter, who has also worked with The Weeknd, BTS and Coldplay. It dates back to a few nights of casual demo writing between Chvrches' Martin Doherty and Holter in 2017. "We were working on some stuff just for fun," Doherty told Billboard.
  
  While Holter worked on smashes like The Weeknd's "Blinding Lights" and "Save Your Tears" and Coldplay & BTS's "My Universe" in the years that followed, the demo remained unfinished.
  
  It didn't fit into the band's self-produced Screen Violence project, but towards the end of 2022, the trio reunited with Holter, who wanted to revisit "Over" and help develop it into a proper Chvrches song. The group and Holter collaborated to improve the track and achieve a sound the band was comfortable with. Doherty said they aimed to create something that "felt like somewhere that Chvrches could be going, potentially - that isn't to say that's where we're going, but something that felt 2023, and not like something that's been kicking around for a few years."
• Chvrches played "Over" live for the first time on March 10, 2023. They performed it while supporting Coldplay at their stadium show in São Paulo, Brazil.