Songfacts®:

• The title track of Halestorm's fourth album was written by frontwoman Lzzy Hale and guitarist Joe Hottinger with father-and-son producers Kevin and Kane Churko during the last writing session for the record. Hottinger had the riff already written on his Manson, Hale penned the lyrics and the Churko duo supplied the rest of the instrumentation.
• Hottinger told Louder Sound that when the Halestorm vocalist hits on a title that she likes, "she just starts writing." When Lzzy came up with "Vicious" she "just went off" and penned all the lyrics. "She didn't even have a melody," he added, "just pages of lyrics and ideas."
• Halestorm were going to call the record something totally different, but when they came up the "Vicious" track they knew that's what the record should be called.
  
  "We'd pretty much had the record written and then we had an offer to go to Los Angeles and write with some people," Hottinger recalled to HMV.com. "Me and Lzzy went, we wanted to test ourselves against all these songwriters with huge hits. In our last session, we came up with the title 'Vicious' and wondered what the song would be about. Then we started working through it and as a title, it just felt great."
• The song features the defiant line "What doesn't kill me makes me vicious."
  
  "To me, it's so much more than overcoming and being strong in the face of adversity, you have to kind of be fierce nowadays," Lzzy Hale told ABC Radio.
• Asked during a Backstage Axxess interview whether this song was inspired by her experiences in the male-dominated music industry, Lzzy Hale replied that "it certainly could be. I write everything from a personal point of view."
  
  She added: "Whether you're talking about being a woman in the industry, whether you're talking about being a woman in general, whether you're talking about being a human being struggling with their place in the world and all the different phases that go along with that, it's just so much more in life right now than being strong and weathering the storm. You kind of have to come at life with a little bit of teeth and be fierce about it - be bold and forceful and force yourself into these situations that maybe make you uncomfortable, maybe make other people uncomfortable. Ultimately, you have to kind of be vicious about it. That was, for me, taking that word 'vicious' and spinning it with that positivity. It's about survival, and not just being strong."
• The video shows Lzzy Hale on a warrior mission as she tries to rescue the rest of her bandmates, who have been captured by her former karate guru. We see flashbacks to Lzzy's brutal physical training regimen as a young girl intercut with the adult Halestorm frontwoman sporting a studded leather jacket and high heels kicking all kinds of butt.