Songfacts®:

• The title track of Maximo Park's sixth album addresses the crisis of dislocated people. Frontman Paul Smith explained to Artist Direct why the issue is so important to him:
  
  "I'd seen an article in a newspaper in the UK. It was a longread article and so it went a little bit further than just a news story. It gave a little background into what was going on in the Mediterranean and the plight of the refugees, and of economic migrants as well - who find themselves in a very perilous situation when they're cut adrift when they're in the middle of the sea - when the people who have got them there, the smugglers and traffickers, who don't care about the end results of what happens - it's a desperate situation."
• Asked by HMV.com when the title "Risk To Exist" popped into his head, Paul Smith replied:
  
  "I was reading Don DeLillo while we were writing and something in his book Mao II made me think about the idea of birth, how fragile people are when they're born and how life could all go in an instant. It seemed to go well with the idea of people being in distress. I was watching the refugee crisis happen and I was following that and seeing all these people drown trying to get Europe, and all those horrible and powerful images seemed to coalesce."
• All profits from this song are donated to Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS), a Malta-based foundation dedicated to preventing loss of life to refugees and migrants at sea. "I read an article about MOAS and the impulse behind it," Smith told The Independent. "It seemed devoid of politics and was responding on a humanitarian level."