Songfacts®:

• Wayne Coyne explained the song's meaning to MusicRadar: "We think of this song as if you're in church, and you're just peering up," he said. "Not that any of us goes to church, but we understand the concept of screaming up to the universe and going, 'Am I alone? What's going on here?' And the universe talks back and says, 'You are alone.'"
  
  "We know that there's an element in our music of being trapped in the isolation your own mind," Coyne continued. "But what do we do about that? Once you acknowledge to yourself that you are trapped inside your own mind, you either find a way to deal with that, or you go insane, or you take drugs or whatever. But there's something about acknowledging it, which is what we do in this song. 'Am I alone?' It's like, everybody's alone in the same way that you're alone."
• Coyne told UK newspaper The Sun this is probably the bleakest track on The Terror. He explained: "I use the term 'trapped in the isolation of our minds.' We feel at our most despairing when we feel alone in the world and surrounded by people who don't feel what we do."
  
  "I'm sure music was invented because of that," he added. "As it started to be created, people would think, 'oh, that's speaking to that thing inside of me. Nothing else is doing that.'"
• The recording of The Terror was almost an accident. While the band were mixing their 2012 collaboration record Heady Fwends, Coyne and his bandmate Steven Drozd found themselves retreating to a second studio at unusual hours to mess around. This was the first song they wrote. "It was just the bleakest, most hopeless, most deafening three minutes of distorted mellow sound that we'd ever heard, which to us was great," Coyne recalled to The Independent. "It doesn't defeat us; it makes us very happy to make music that sounds like you want to kill yourself, you know?"
• Coyne told Consequence Of Sound in 2017 how the track set the tone for the album: "That was the mood we were fascinated by for a long time. We set out trying to do a series of songs that had a feeling: this bleak, religious, detached, heavy thing. We spent a week in the studio at my house, and we felt free to make songs sprawling again. We wanted that; we hadn't quite made a record that was so noisy and sinister, but had a lot of soul and heart to it, and death. I don't think we had quite been able to do that before. Calling it something like The Terror was perfect for the time it came out. It really did sum up a version of a personality that we weren't brave enough to face before. We were carrying a weight, and we were scared for many years, and stupid, and everything all at the same time. If we hadn't made that record, we would still be trying to make that record."