Songfacts®:

• This was the first song that Florence Welch wrote for her second album, Ceremonials. She penned the intro on her tour bus at four in the morning, whilst driving to Amsterdam. Florence explained to MTV News: "We had gone out for [Machine member] Rob [Ackroyd]'s birthday to an all-night restaurant in Brussels called Midnights. We went to this funny restaurant and then got on the tour bus and everyone was a bit drunk and it was like, 'Yeah, let's write a song.'
  
  And we recorded the sound of the bus moving, a real drone-y bass sound, and that's the intro, and then the tour bus arrived in Amsterdam [and we were saying], 'Let's go toast this song! We will find a bar that will serve us drinks at 7 in the morning! Come!' So we trotted off into Amsterdam and managed to find a sports bar that would only serve us Midori. It was bright-green drinks and me and [Machine member] Isa [Summers] kind of looking like crazy old ladies."
• Florence told NME: "Most of my influences have been male singers and the people I grew up watching perform were all these garage punk bands who went to Camberwell Art College with male singers who were almost trying to exorcise the audience. So when I write songs like 'No Light, No Light', I'm thinking about the rhythm and the chant and the aggression rather than the melodic mellifluousness of it."
• Directed by Icelandic duo Arni & Kinski, the video sees Florence Welch being chased by a man in black body paint, who we see pinning a voodoo doll. The religious and racial imagery of the clip prompted heated chatter on the net with some accusing it of containing satanic and White Supremacist imagery.
• Time magazine named this as the 2011 Song Of The Year with Adele's "Rolling In The Deep," the runner-up. The magazine explained why saying the song, "could be the sound of a religious revival. Florence Welch's rich voice has never sounded better than on this track; her fervent, even rapturous, lamentations about her partner's lost love resonate like requests for salvation made by a faltering believer with arms raised to the sky. 'Heaven help me, I need to make it right' she wails, but gets no reply. Replete with harps and a tribal drum beat, 'No Light, No Light' operates as a plea for salvation that will soon have you running to your deity of choice."