Songfacts®:

• Doom Days is a concept record recounting the course of a night out during the apocalypse. This song, the second track on the album, takes place at 12:48 a.m. as frontman Dan Smith begins to delve into the events that take place.
• The song is a celebration of the bad decisions we all make. Smith explained to Billboard he is examining three types of choices.
  
  1) The stupid stuff we do in our personal lives – things we know aren't doing us any good, but we just can't help ourselves.
  
  2) The decision to stay in a relationship when you realize it's leading you into a destructive place, but you don't want to let go of it.
  
  3) Collective decisions on a macro scale such as elections, which "ultimately we all have to live through."
• Dan Smith makes several pop culture references in the second verse.
  
  I'm here feeling lower than the sterling
  How'd you look so good?
  Groundhog evening, dancing on the ceiling
  Kubrick's Hollywood
  
  Smith explained the record is "grounded in a personal story" and the listener can take away what they want. He added: "I wanted to litter the album with pop culture references and references to the apocalypse, to have this almost tongue-in-cheek sense that there's an apocalypse happening outside, and I guess it's up to whoever's listening to decide if they choose to take that as literal."
• The comedic video was directed by Zac Ella (Wiley, Superfood) and Emile Rafael (X Ambassadors, Jamie N Commons). We see Dan Smith as sleazy self-help guru Dr. Dan Bastille, who is plugging his book Bad Decisions in an infomercial. While Dr. Dan dispenses questionable advice, the camera follows several more characters, also played by Smith, who exterminate each other. The other Bastille band members, Kyle Simmons, Will Farquarson, and Chris Wood, make cameos early on in the visual.