Songfacts®:

• Metric frontwoman Emily Haines makes an unusual cry for help in this song, where she's alive but her heart is beating like a hammer. She wrote it on piano during a trip to Buenos Aires, where she was doing some soul searching and trying to break out of a funk.
  
  "I was like, F--k this, I'm not going to be miserable when there are too many opportunities to create my own life," she told 303 Magazine. "I have to shake myself out of this."
• The song is part of Metric's fourth album, Fantasies, released in 2009. In a Rhapsody interview, Metric guitarist James Shaw explained the inspiration for the album title: "[It's] the idea of dreaming, we're dreamers... There was a quote that kept us in line on the content, which was a guy who said something in a hotel party: he thought it would be interesting if our next record was not so much about pointing out what's wrong with the current state of the world, but possibly dreaming about the world that Metric would want to live in, and shedding light on a possible future that would be a better world to live in. That idea stayed with us. We're trying to envision a world that doesn't have a shopping list of problems, the four of us feel like we're entering an age of hope instead of an age of pessimism."
• This wasn't supposed to be album's lead single, but it beat the hell out of "Gimme Sympathy" in a fight and won its place. Shaw told Rhapsody: "I imagine our songs as people. 'Help I'm Alive' punched 'Gimme Sympathy' in the face and jumped in front of it. We had this image of me coming into the studio one day and the back door was wide open and there were only nine singles there, and 'Help I'm Alive' had run out and was streaking down the neighborhood."
• A few weeks after the song's initial release, an acoustic version - with Shaw on acoustic guitar and Haines on piano - was released as a single.
• "Help I'm Alive" has been featured on the TV shows One Tree Hill (episode: "Believe Me, I'm Lying," 2009), The Vampire Diaries (episode: "The Night of the Comet," 2009), 90210 (episode: "Age of Inheritance," 2010), and Grey's Anatomy (episode: "If Only You Were Lonely," 2012). It also shows up in the 2026 movie We Bury The Dead.
• This peaked at #21 on the band's home chart, the Canadian Hot 100. It was also their first track to break into the US charts, where it landed at #17 on the Alternative Songs chart and #30 on the Rock Songs chart.
• "Help I'm Alive" started as a ballad, but according to Emily Haines, it "really came to life once we bumped up the tempo."
  
  "My favorite part of the song is the kick drum sound in the middle section," she told Drowned In Sound. "It sounds like the drums are being played in a cathedral in hell."