Songfacts®:

• This proggy, synth-heavy, slow-burner originated from an advert that frontman Jonathan Higgs heard. He told Apple Music it had this "really slow triplet-y synth thing," which he tried to re-create, but it went wrong. However, Higgs still liked the end result: "This really slow 6/8 feel. And then it goes double-speed for the chorus."
• Lyrically, the song finds Higgs crying out for acceptance.
  
  Can you love me?
  More than the planets
  
  Higgs is struggling with romantic love, so he resorts to a love of nature and natural things. He explained it's "a song about calling out to be loved, feeling unworthy and finding the love of the universe instead."
• Higgs admitted to Apple Music the lyrics are "really ridiculous." He explained they were some of the last ones he wrote for Re-Animator, and realizing much of the record was quite somber, he "threw all of my fun into this last song, so that there is that color on this record."
• "Planets" is the third single released from Re-Animator. The album finds Everything Everything operating on a more instinctive level than past releases. "It's full of beautiful human experiences - love, death, sex, birth, life," bassist Jeremy Pritchard told Uncut magazine. "This exploration is over the songs. Our last two albums was steeped in social-political machinations and we just got tired of carrying all that around. There's more of an ease about this one."
• Higgs directed the bizarre video, which features a lip-synching chimpanzee puppet during the coronavirus-enforced lockdown. He explained it focuses on a primate caught up in an existential dilemma as he compares his relative insignificance to the universe.
  
  "I kind of wanted it to be like Carl Sagan-like, Cosmos, '70s sort of slightly crappy space stuff," Higgs said. "And the monkey just seemed to fit in in sort of a 2001: A Space Odyssey kind of way. There's some kind of deep connection between the planets and monkeys! So it was really as simple as that."