Songfacts®:

• Hozier enlisted Games Of Thrones star Natalie Dormer for the song's music video. She appears to be playing a femme fatale seemingly working her way through a series of strangers in late night encounters whilst Hozier strums onstage at a dark, moody club. However, the steamy sessions are just a figment of her imagination stirred by coveting the romantic partners of people she sees on the street. "It was a joy to be a part of the 'Someone New' video," she said. "It plays with ideas of how loneliness and isolation are two different things and the weight or lightness we can attach to loving another person."
• Whilst performing this song at an iHeart Radio live event, Hozier admitted that he wrote it with a former love. "This next song is a fun one, it's about love at its most... futile and shallow and useless," he said. "And, awkwardly, I wrote it with an ex-girlfriend."
  
  Irish-Sierra Leonean soul singer Sallay Matu Garnett is listed on the album credits as having written the tune along with Hozier.
• The song was released as the fifth single from Hozier's self-titled debut studio LP. "The album is about love from a dark place, or love from an empty place," he explained to Q magazine. "Realizing that everyone is just scrambling around trying to make do is something that informs the album. Being a teenager would be a lot easier if people said, 'Everyone's unhappy, man, don't worry about it.'"
  
  He added: "Ultimately, you look for a reassuring thought, 'When does this get better?' But it may not, and then you die, so that feeling of not being able to gain reassurance in anything is very human."