Songfacts®:

• This song compares an argument between two people in a relationship to a papercut. The pain is immediate but once the couple make up it seems to have been inconsequential. Guest vocalist, YouTube star Troye Sivan, sings of the fleeting discomfort for the temporarily lovelorn pair.
• Zedd wrote in a Genius annotation:
  
  "'Papercut' was the last song I wrote for the album. Sonically I think it has a lot of room, a lot of space.
  
  I grew up listening to Deep Purple, Genesis, King Crimson, a lot of George Benson. The chord progression reminds me of a lot of those old songs that I used to listen to and maybe even a little bit of classical influence."
• The animated video is synced to Grey's official remix of the song. Produced and directed by Golden Wolf, the animation was done by a number of different collaborators. "After coming up with the storyline we put together a script, storyboard and animatic and then divided the shots between ourselves and 10 of our favorite collaborators, with the only guideline being to work in black and white with a hand drawn feel," said the Golden Wolf team.