Songfacts®:

• After being dropped by Warner after falling out with them, the Futureheads set up their own record label. This was one of the first songs that they wrote for their first release on Nul Records.
• Frontman Barry Hyde explained to the BBC why they named their album after this song. He said: "Thinking of names for albums tends to be either very easy or very, very difficult. If you name your album after something completely unconnected, there's a chance that people will question that. But the song, This Is Not The World, is to me quite an important song. It's one of the first songs we wrote after we split from Warner. That happening is possibly the most important thing that has ever happened to this band. We'd still be signed to Warner and we wouldn't have made this album. I wasn't even willing to write any more songs for Warner to be honest with you. I was just going to do a Lou Reed Metal Machine music and deliver them an album of white noise and say, 'Release that. See if you can do any better with this!'"
• The former Killing Joke bassist Martin "Youth" Glover produced this song along with the rest of the album. Youth is best known for his production work on The Verve's 1997 album Urban Hymns, including the hit singles "Bittersweet Symphony" and "The Drugs Don't Work." Hyde told the BBC about working with him: "Youth is a fantastic producer. I find that producers have very different methods of working, but Youth's main goal from a session is to get the musicians in the right frame of mind - the frame of mind to be creative. Some producers, their art relies on technology, expensive microphones and technical ability, whereas Youth is almost like a priest! [He laughs] He makes you remember what music is about and he has an amazing way of tapping into an essence of a song."