Songfacts®:

• "Erasure" is the third track on Corinne Bailey Rae's fourth studio album, Black Rainbows, which was inspired by her visits to a Black history exhibition by Theaster Gates in Chicago. The song confronts the brutal erasure of Black childhood.
• They put out lit cigarettes down your sweet throat
  They fed you to the alligators
  
  This imagery connects directly to Corinne Bailey Rae's reaction to the exhibition, where she saw disturbing depictions of Black children threatened by alligators and a sculpture depicting a child used as an ashtray.
  
  "I saw scores and scores of postcards of children escaping from alligators, and the threat of children being fed to them," said Bailey Rae. "Some plantations were surrounded by alligator swamps. I saw what looked like a small sculpture of a boy with his mouth open sitting on a potty. He looks like a toddler who's really struggling, crying because he's trying to use the toilet. As a mother, I feel such a huge connection to this boy that's not a real boy, but it stands in for many children who are in discomfort and needing the love of a mother. But then I looked closer and realized that the potty detaches, and it was an ashtray. People put out cigarettes into the throat of a child. I thought "What kind of world is this where this piece is made for white amusement?"
• Bailey Rae spits the lyrics out as a stream of consciousness during this irate song. "We were just kind of holed up in this place next to the Arts Bank in November," she told The Sun. "It was freezing cold, it had snowed and I was playing my guitar and all of this came out as I recorded it."
• "Erasure" explodes with a sonic fury. Grinding guitars and clattering percussion create a tense atmosphere, complementing Corinne Bailey Rae's impassioned vocals. Her voice, at times bordering on a scream, reflects the song's raw emotion and urgency. "I was so full of disbelief and anger at seeing all this historical anti-black propaganda that was so persuasive," she told Uncut magazine, "and that informed the sense of rage that track has."