Songfacts®:

• The song was inspired by an incident when a humbled Matt Bellamy had to go cap-in-hand to Goldie Hawn's house, as she is the mother of his girlfriend Kate Hudson. The Muse frontman recalled to NME: "You've had a fight with your girlfriend and she goes out to her mum's house for the day and you're on your own going, 'What did I say?' I'm sure a lot of blokes have that experience in the early stages of relationships where you go, 'Yeah, she's right, isn't she?'"
• Bellamy told Los Angeles radio station KROQ that he considers this to be his favorite of his songs. "I wrote that song having a fight with my girlfriend," said the frontman. "Nothing particularly over the top but just having one of those moments where she leaves you for the day to think about it. I rarely write songs that catharticly. All I had was a drum machine and a synthesizer so I just put this very minimal thing together."
  
  "I wasn't quite sure it would work with the band," he added, "but when we started the album I showed it to Dom and Chris and they loved it. They sort of took it to another level by adding these extra parts at the end and it became a much bigger song. It's a real surprise song for this album. It's probably my favorite song that I've ever written."
• Drummer Dominic Howard told Mary Anne Hobbs about the song on Radio Xfm: "It's like a very minimal, electronic, almost like a ballad. It's something very, very different for us and I guess it builds - like most of our songs really. It just felt like something very fresh for us, felt like something we'd never done before so that's why we thought it would be a good idea to put that out."
• Speaking to the New Zealand Herald, Bellamy said The 2nd Law contains songs about his own private life for the first time since the band's 1999 debut album Showbiz. "We're singing about things like relationships for the first time," he said. "Actually, I did that for a bit on the first album, but then I started doing interviews and thought, 'Oh my God, I can't answer these questions they're getting too personal'. So that's when we started getting all conceptual and pretending the album was about the end of the world, or whatever."
• The song spent a then unprecedented 19 weeks at #1 on Billboard's Alternative Chart, surpassing the previous record holder, Foo Fighters' "The Pretender," which spent 18 weeks at the summit in 2007.
  
  Muse's record was taken from them when Portugal. The Man's "Feel It Still" spent its 20th week at #1 on the Alternative Songs chart dated December 9, 2017.
• The song's music video was directed by Anthony Mandler and filmed on the Red Line platform at Los Angeles Union Station. Mandler previously shot Muse's clip for "Neutron Star Collision (Love Is Forever)." The two main characters are played by models Erin Wasson and Emile Hirsch.