Songfacts®:

• This was the track that set the direction for Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt. Moby explained to HMV.com:
  
  "I wrote the chorus for 'This Wild Darkness' in about two minutes and I really liked it, so then I recorded it and added strings, different orchestration, drums, and I guess that was kind of the start point. I realized it had this kind of quiet, pretty, downtempo, understated quality to it, and that kind of determined what the rest of the record was going to sound like."
• Moby explained the song's meaning on Twitter: "The world is a baffling place, full of confusion and darkness, and 'this wild darkness' is essentially an existential dialogue between me and the gospel choir - Me talking about my confusion, the choir answering with longing and hope."
• Without delving into politics, which he already did on his previous two releases (under the moniker Moby & The Void Pacific Choir), Moby's 15th studio album examines the wretched state of humanity. He told Entertainment Weekly the concept involves "the dialectic between light and dark, between hard and vulnerable." He continued: "I feel like that's the best description of who we are at this point. We're super vulnerable and super dangerous at the same time. We burn through all our resources, we create all this misery, and the end result is we're not very happy. This lunatic party that we've had for the last 100 years of burning and destroying everything would almost be excusable if we were really, really happy. The music on this record is looking at that."
• Moby also explained why he wanted to incorporate sonic imperfections in the album's tunes: "I like the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi: An entropic brokenness is more interesting and more compelling than a clean perfection. The example would be that an old broken wooden bucket is a lot more interesting than a new plastic bucket from Home Depot. It's informed by that, and also just my weird love of old equipment. A lot of the imperfection on the record comes from using old equipment that doesn't work very well. A degree of honesty and vulnerability just feels healthier and certainly more engaging. If you go on a date with someone, you don't want to go on a date with perfection - you want to go on a date with someone who's a little bit messy and emotionally open."
• In the music video, we survey a world wrecked by war and devastation from the vantage point of a spaceship floating above the Earth. Moby directed the clip with Rob Gordon Bravler, who went on to direct the artist's 2021 documentary, Moby Doc.