Songfacts®:

• Fletcher gives off Kesha vibes in "War Paint," a banger with a tribal beat where she's ready to fight to keep her love alive. It's loaded with bellicose metaphors:
  
  The arrows are drawn, the sergeant's on the saddle
  
  Bang bang, I can hear the shots
  
  Shooting down the walls of heartache (OK, this one is actually Scandal's '80s hit "The Warrior")
  
  There's no doubt that Fletcher is primed for battle.
• "War Paint" was Fletcher's first single, released in the summer of 2015. Four years earlier, she was on the American version of The X Factor, where she was teamed with three other girls to form a group called Lakoda Rayne. She was going by her full name, Cari Fletcher, back then. They got knocked out early on, but Cari rebranded as Fletcher and headed to Nashville, where she wrote "War Paint" with Jamie Kenney, who produced the track. It got a buzz, as did her debut EP, Finding Fletcher, which includes "War Paint" and was self-released in 2016.
  
  Fletcher earned a record deal with Capitol, which released her EP You Ruined New York City For Me in 2019. The song "Undrunk" became her first chart hit and earned Fletcher a sizable following. Her wild lifestyle informed her songwriting and helped her succeed on social media. She gave 'em something to talk about in 2020 when she put out an EP called The S(ex) Tapes, recorded during quarantine when she was living with the ex who inspired the songs.
• Fletcher was still a student at New York University when she released this song - she was just 21. She graduated the following year.
• The song doesn't seem to hold much meaning for Fletcher, who hardly ever played it live. Over the next few years she wrote more personal songs that dominated her setlists and also came out as queer.