Songfacts®:

• Charli XCX frequently references cars in her work (check out 2016's "Vroom Vroom" and 2019's "White Mercedes"). Here, she sings about the act of collision to frame her self-destructive tendencies after a breakup. "I've always been very fascinated and very drawn toward cars in pop music and lyrics in videos," Charli told MTV News. "I guess it's just this fast, like, crash-and-burn type of life that I feel like is very reflective of the way that I have kind of navigated my career."
  
  Charli added that the song title references a lyric in her breakthrough song, "I Love It," which she wrote, then gave to Icona Pop.
  
  I got this feeling on the summer day when you were gone
  I crashed my car into the bridge, I watched, I let it burn
• Charli told Apple Music she originally planned on calling her fifth studio album Sorry If I Hurt You. Then one day, while driving her car, the title "Crash" came to her. She called her creative confidant A. G. Cook, who agreed it made sense with the constant car references in her work. Charli also liked the onomatopoeia, how it references "Boom Clap" and its "punchy, in-your-face" feel.
  
  Having come up with a title, Charli needed a song to go with it, so she and Cook went into the studio and started writing. They knew they needed to come up with something "extremely '80s" to go with the rest of the album's '80s synth-pop sound. "If you could bottle the album into one song, this is it," she said.
  
  Charli inserted some New Jack Swing beats that Cook and the song's co-producer, George Daniel of The 1975, had been sending her, plus a guitar solo, and "these crazy Janet-esque stabs."
• Crash topped the UK albums chart, becoming Charli XCX's first UK #1 album. Her previous highest charting LP was 2019's Charli, which reached #14. It also became her first #1 album in Australia and Ireland, and first Top 10 in the US.