Songfacts®:

• "Love Race" is a lighthearted pop-punk tune in which Machine Gun Kelly teams up with Kellin Quinn of American rock band Sleeping With Sirens. Both the bad-boy singers swap vocals about a relationship with a good girl where their dark past is catching up with them.
• MGK's regular collaborator Travis Barker produced the song. Released on April 29, 2021, the track retains the pop-punk stylings of the rapper-turned-rockstar's 2020 album, Tickets To My Downfall.
• This is the third collaboration between Machine Gun Kelly and Kellin following MGK's feature on Sleeping With Sirens' 2013 single "Alone" and their cover of Rise Against's "Swing Life Away" recorded for Kelly's 2013 mixtape Black Flag. MGK and Kellin first met when they were both on the 2012 Warped tour.
• Jared Gutstadt and Jeff Peters of Audio Up create podcasts for the musically inclined and were working on a project co-starring Machine Gun Kelly. The pop-punk rocker came to their studio in October 2020 and the two played him some of the music they'd come up with for the podcast. Gutstadt recalled to American Songwriter that when they showed him the first draft of "Love Race," he cryptically said, "Actually, can I take the files with me? I don't love this one, I don't know if it's going to fit into the project."
  
  Two months later, Gutstadt and Peters were told it was going to be MGK's next single.
• Kelly improvised his lyrics for the song live in the studio, getting his parts done in five minutes. Then with the help of Barker and Quinn, he fleshed out the rest of the song. "Machine Gun Kelly was quoted somewhere saying that he wrote the song in five minutes - from his perspective, that's very much true," Gutstadt said. "Everything he has on the track now, he did in the room. We had already written the hook, but he came in and just launched right into 'Found a silver ring. Put it on her finger.' All of that stuff came right out."
• The music video features a group of teenagers getting picked off one by one by a masked killer at an emo summer camp. Machine Gun Kelly plays multiple characters and Kellin Quinn portrays a lifeguard in the pool. The slasher movie-inspired clip also features Barker playing drums, as well as TikTokkers Alissa Violet, Xowie and Noah Beck. Kelly co-directed the visual with Isaac Rentz (Katy Perry, 5 Seconds Of Summer, Blink 182).