Songfacts®:

• This is the first single from American rock band Incubus' seventh album If Not Now, When?. It was the group's first release for two years, their previous single being their 2009 cover of Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" from their compilation album, Monuments and Melodies.
• Lyrically the track finds Brandon Boyd singing about feeling overwhelmed and out of bounds as adolescents tend to do, "Out of sight, out of mind," he croons. "We're out of time."
• Boyd took to the band's official website to share some thoughts about the song: "It begins with Michael's unmistakable and inimitable guitar work and rolls its way into a kind of drunken waltz. Creeping its way into the idea that we are collectively just about to reach our cultural teenage years. It does seem like we've been around forever. Us, I mean. People. Culture. But all it takes is a sojourn into Earth's biological record to realize that WE are quite new! And the transitions at play in our complex little game are akin to the struggles that an adolescent might endure."
• Guitarist Mike Einziger told Rock Sound magazine: "This song definitely links our older material to the new album, which I think fans will enjoy and appreciate. It's actually the lead single from the record, even though it was the last song we wrote. The writing process for 'Adolescents' was so fast; the song appeared really easily when we went into the studio."
• Boyd told Billboard magazine, the song "almost didn't make it on the record. We weren't 100 percent about it; we were toying between that track and a couple of other tracks that are going to end up being B-sides. But it started working on the radio and we started playing it live, and it's a really enjoyable song to play and the kids seem to be enjoying it as well, so it is what it is."