Songfacts®:

• Don't be fooled by the chipper, comforting music in this song. It's about how we'll become silhouettes after a nuclear war, when those black impressions are all that's left of us. The song is written from the perspective of a survivor, waiting out a nuclear winter in a bunker.
  
  Postal Service lead vocalist and lyricist Ben Gibbard wrote the song in response to the "paralyzation of fear" after the attacks of September 11, 2001. "Every day there was just some kind of new piece of terrifying information that was being disseminated into the world," he explained to Life Of The Record. I found myself on edge all the time for months... there were a lot of moments where it kind of felt like the world was just ending. Like this terrible tragedy was going to be the fulcrum upon which all these other terrible things started happening."
• It's understandable if you read this one as perhaps a romantic song, because that's on par with Ben Gibbard's music with Death Cab for Cutie - tunes like "I Will Follow You into the Dark" and "Soul Meets Body." The Postal Service is his collaboration with Jimmy Tamborello, a producer/DJ who supplies the quirky, fanciful beats that Gibbard writes to. It brings out his dark humor.
  
  "I've always liked those juxtapositions," he said. "I've always liked, 'music is sad, words are happy.' Or "music is happy, words are sad," and this is definitely the latter of that. It's like the music is upbeat and happy and probably should be about something else. But in this moment I decided that it should be about nuclear winter."
• The song is from the album Give Up, which true to its title, is the only one The Postal Service released. They formed at the behest of Sub Pop Records in 2001 after Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello collaborated on a song called "(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan." They were geographically separated, so worked by sending CDs back and forth, very slowly and very inexpensively coming up with the 10 songs for the album.
  
  Give Up was released in February 2003 with "Such Great Heights" and "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight" released as singles. They toured that year, and those songs made their way around the internet and got some airplay on some adventurous radio stations.
  
  Sub Pop waited until February 2005 to put out "We Will Become Silhouettes" as a single, and it charted at #82 before dropping off a week later. The band was inactive at this point, but their music kept finding new fans, and Give Up eventually sold over a million copies, giving Sub Pop a very impressive return on investment. The Postal Service made a few new songs in 2013 and also toured that year, and they toured again in 2023, but did very little in between as Gibbard focused on Death Cab and Tamborello on his solo work and DJ gigs.
• That female voice in the chorus is Jenny Lewis, who sang backup on six songs from the album. The plan was to use only Ben Gibbard's voice, layering it for background vocals, but he and Tamborello thought some songs could use a female vocal. They didn't know Lewis but her band Rilo Kiley was signed to the same label as Death Cab For Cutie, Barsuk Records, so they were able to contact her and bring her into the project. She ended up touring with the group when they hit the road.
• The music video was directed by Jared Hess, the guy who brought us Napoleon Dynamite (thank you Jared!). Jenny Lewis appears in it along with Gibbard and Tamborello, playing the role of a family in the 1970s or 1980s who live in a world where no other people are around, presumably because of a nuclear war or other extinction event.