Songfacts®:

• Five Finger Death Punch frontman Ivan Moody developed a serious drinking problem in 2012 while the band toured in support of their American Capitalist album. By 2016 his alcoholism had become too much for the group to tolerate and All That Remains frontman Phil Labonte replaced him on tour. The next year Moody checked himself into rehab, and by December 2019, the now-sober frontman had returned to touring with Five Finger. This one of several tracks on F8 that chronicles the wild ride to sobriety taken by Moody.
• Moody speaks about the insecurity, anger and helplessness he felt during his near-fatal struggle with alcohol addiction.
  
  Waiting for someone to save me
  But everyone just runs away
  Waiting for someone to change me
  But no one ever comes
  
  Guitarist Zoltan Bathory acknowledged there were some who wanted Moody to fail. "When it seemed like he wasn't going to make it, there were some vultures, there were some negative people," he said to Billboard. "He's definitely lashing out against them. He saw that some people left him in the ditch, so to speak."
  
  Bathory added that the song's message can be applied to other circumstances as well. "It's all in the lyrics, and I think either everybody has gone through something like this or knows somebody like this," he maintained. "And the lyrics are vague enough that you don't have to equate every single lyric with alcoholism. They fit all kinds of situations in life. That's when lyrics are great, when you can get adopt them to different scenarios so it will mean something else. It's not spelled out so strictly that you cannot take it in any other way than what it is."
• The song appears on the soundtrack to the 2021 high-octane horror/thriller The Retaliators. The band members feature in special cameos during the movie.
• The music video combines epic performance shots with footage from The Retaliators.
• "Darkness Settles In" reached #1 on the Mainstream Rock Songs chart, becoming Five Finger Death Punch's 11th song to top the tally. The previous ten were:
  
  "Coming Down"
  "Battle Born"
  "Lift Me Up"
  "Wash It All Away"
  "Sham Pain"
  "When The Seasons Change"
  A cover of Kenny Wayne Shepherd's "Blue On Black"
  "Inside Out"
  "A Little Bit Off"
  "Living The Dream"