Songfacts®:

• This melancholic song finds Yannis Philippakis singing about a loved one dying far away from home. "On 'Into The Surf' there's this shadow of death, of someone not returning from a voyage," he explained to DIY magazine. "There's a type of Greek folk song that's always to do with the immigration of Greek people and how dying on foreign shores is always viewed as the worst fate – to die far away from your home and your family."
• The short instrumental "Surf Pt.1" from Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Part 1 is a chop out of "Into the Surf." Philippakis wanted to include the layer of sound as a tease before the release of Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Part 2 seven months later.
  
  "I liked the fact that it's alluding to what's to come on album two and when you get to album two, you hear it refashioned in a song," he explained to Consequence of Sound. "As a music fan, that would be the kind of thing that makes me go, 'Well, that's cool,' as a nerdy thing. We just felt that it was pretty and it deserved its own moment."
• The sparse, animated video reflects Yannis Philippakis' Greek heritage and reflects the song's lyrical themes.
  
  "By mixing traditional stop-motion with live action and digital animation techniques the idea was to aim for something that felt just about tangible but almost out of reach, echoing the themes of the song in a heightened dreamlike way," said director Steve Warne. "A little bit of reality with a dose of mystery."