Songfacts®:

• "Cut You Off" is an ode to a romantic relationship where Selena Gomez was mistreated. Now, after four years she has decided to conclusively cut the guy off from her life.
  
  Gotta chop chop all the extra weight
  I've been carrying for 1,460 days
  
  Selena knows it's time to leave her toxic boyfriend and move forward.
• Many Selantors have questioned whether the song is about Justin Bieber, with whom the singer had an on-and off-again relationship between 2010 and 2018. The song's co-writer Liza Owen added to the speculation when she said they wrote the song about an "a--hole boy who shall not be named."
• Gomez sings in the second verse:
  
  I imagine all the endless places I could know
  With a drop-drop and I'll let you go
  All the possibilities I got from head to toe
  Yeah, they'd, yeah, they'd, yeah, they'd start to show
  
  Gomez said during an iHeartRadio listening party she is "explaining there's so many places I could go, there's so many things I could do not being held down by something."
• Gomez wrote the song with:
  
  Los Angeles songwriter Chloe Angelides, whose previously collaborations with Gomez include "Sober" and "Fetish."
  
  Singer-songwriter Liza Owen, whose other writing credits include BTS' "Airplane pt. 2" and Cedric Gervais' "Somebody New."
  
  Los Angeles producer David Pramik who has written and produced songs for a number of artists, including the Grammy-nominated Nothing More track "Go To War" and the Machine Gun Kelly cut "Home."