Songfacts®:

• "New Religion" is Bebe Rexha's dance-floor-as-sanctuary song. The nightclub is cast as a church bathed in neon lights, offering secular transcendence through music and movement. The central theme is healing through dance music.
• Rexha wrote the song during a difficult period. She had recently gone independent after years at Warner Bros. Records, a time she describes as being "stuck in a cage." Dance music became her creative and emotional reset.
  
  "'New Religion' is really my salvation on the dance floor," she explained. "It's about letting go and getting lost in the music. I was in a dark place when I wrote it, and I realized music had always been the one thing that never left me, it's always had my back, even in a tough industry and a heavy world. I wanted to write a love letter to music itself. When the bass hits, you feel it in your chest and suddenly you feel alive again."
  
  Rexha also described the track as "my love letter to music. My sanctuary. My salvation on the dance floor. It's about remembering that music has always been there for me, through every high and every low."
• The track samples "Insomnia" by the British dance group Faithless, originally released in 1995. The track follows in the tradition of Faithless's own "God Is A DJ" (1998), which similarly framed the dancefloor as a spiritual space. Rexha and Faithless previously worked together on Faithless' 2025 single "Dollars and Dimes."
• Faithless's "Insomnia" was written and recorded by Sister Bliss, Maxi Jazz and Rollo Armstrong in a garden-shed studio at Rollo's home in 1995. Released November 27, 1995, from the debut album Reverence, the track didn't get much attention until 1996, when it reached #3 on the UK Singles Chart and topped European dance charts. It became a perennial Ibiza and festival anthem.
• The genesis of "New Religion" traces back to Rexha's childhood in New York City. Her uncle, an aspiring DJ, first played her Faithless' "Insomnia" when she was young. She heard the track throughout her life without knowing who made it.
  
  "My uncle, when I was growing up in New York City, was trying to be a DJ," Rexha told People magazine. "The word is trying. I remember him playing that for me the first time. And then I would hear it throughout my life, not knowing, when I was younger, where the song was coming from or who the artist was."
  
  A concept a friend had played to Rexha in the studio included the phrase "new religion," and the singer and the writing team built from there, incorporating the Faithless sample spontaneously. "It didn't even come into my mind about wanting to remake it," Rexha recalled. "It just fell into our laps when we were in the studio... and it just fit."
• "New Religion" contains elements of the original production of "Insomnia," the actual sounds stored on tape from the 1995 sessions. This is unprecedented: in roughly 30 years, Faithless had never allowed anyone to properly sample the record. The approval process took three years, and Rexha had to negotiate through Sister Bliss and Rollo. Maxi Jazz, the group's frontman and lyricist, died on December 26, 2022, aged 65.
  
  Obtaining the original tape elements proved a journey in itself. Rexha recounted:
  
  "I messaged them and said, 'Hey, can I get the original drop?' And they're like, 'Well, that's not going to be easy.' I was like, 'Why?' And they're like, 'Because it's on tape.' And I was like, 'It's on f---ing tape?' … It's amazing to have a piece of the original record on my record. I did not expect that to happen. It only took about three years. That's why the gray hairs are coming in right now."
  
  Rexha also recalled a formative brunch in London with Sister Bliss:
  
  "I remember sitting at brunch in London with Sister Bliss, and she was describing how they did it back in the day. Me and my f---ing digital era of making music, I was like, 'What effects did you use?' And she started laughing and she's like, 'Oh, that's not how we did it.' And I was like, 'Wow.'"
• Bebe Rexha wrote the song with the track's producers: Punctual's John Morgan and William Lansley, along with Neave Applebaum.
  
  Rexha also co-produced the track. Before launching her own recording career, she penned hits for Eminem and Rihanna ("The Monster"), and wrote for Selena Gomez ("Like A Champion," "Crowded Room").
  
  Punctual - the British writer-producer duo of John Morgan and William (Will) Lansley - have credits spanning Raye, Kylie Minogue, Nelly Furtado, Rita Ora, Clean Bandit, Rudimental, Jason Derulo, Ella Henderson, and MNEK.
  
  Neave Applebaum is a UK-based songwriter and producer whose clients include David Guetta, Becky Hill, Joel Corry, Nathan Dawe and Kylie Minogue. Applebaum had previously worked alongside Punctual on Kylie's "Hello" and Nathan Dawe material, making "New Religion" a reunion of that creative unit.
• "New Religion" was released as a single from Rexha's fourth album, Dirty Blonde. Rexha described the album's concept as being about stripping everything back and being "unapologetically myself." She noted the title has a double meaning: blonde as a hair color, and "dirty" as a declaration of raw authenticity.
• The Dirty Blonde album is billed as a visual album, with a music video for every track. After Rexha shot all 13 videos in just three days, she released a super-cut of all the videos - mixed into a four-minute mega-mix by Diplo - and invited fans to vote on which song should be released next as the rollout single. "New Religion" was the runaway fan favorite, accumulating around 200,000 votes.