Songfacts®:

• This was the first track to be released by the English synthpop duo Hurts, from their sophomore album Exile. It received its first worldwide radio play on the BBC Radio 1 Breakfast show on January 4, 2013.
• The song is heavier and more guitar-led than the tracks on Hurts' debut album. It is one of several cuts on Exile that were penned after Adam Anderson listened back to the demos that he and Theo Hutchcraft had done in their old bands and found them naïve, flawed and yet full of energy. Hutchcraft explained: "We wanted people to hear 'The Road' first because it's the most extreme example of the idea on the record."
• The lyrics are about a car accident and were inspired by JG Ballard's novel Crash and colored by Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic book The Road, which Hutchcraft read three times while writing Exile. "We tried to write the darkest song we could," Hutchcraft told NME. "We thought. 'How bleak can we make it?'"
  
  James Graham Ballard (1930-2009) was an English novelist and short story writer. His best-known works include Crash, which was adapted into a film by David Cronenberg and his fictionalised autobiography of his childhood in a Japanese internment camp outside Shanghai, which was made into a movie by Steven Spielberg.
  
  Here are some other songs on our database inspired by Ballard's stories:
  "A Billion Balconies Facing The Sun" by The Manic Street Preachers.
  "Atrocity Exhibition" by Joy Division.
  
  In addition, the Australian Electro-Pop duo Empire Of the Sun took their name from Ballard's autobiographical novel of the same name.
  
  Cormac McCarthy (born July 20, 1933) is an American novelist and playwright. He is best known for his 2006 Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road and his 2005 book No Country for Old Men, which was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, and won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.Other songs on our database inspired by his works include:
  "Major Minus" by Coldplay.
  "Breathe" by U2.
  "Pray For Rain" by Massive Attack.
  "As He Climbed the Dark Mountain" by Thursday.