Songfacts®:

• This menacing, industrial-sounding track was the first song Garbage put together after reconvening following an indefinite hiatus. "This song happened on either the first or second day that we got together," guitarist Steve Marker recalled to MusicRadar.com. "We were just trying to see if this whole thing would work. We had a rule that nobody could bring in any demos or old ideas; we were just going to set up in a studio and jam. Battle In Me resulted from that. The jam was probably 20 minutes on the hard drive. Each of us took it home and messed with it to make it the song that's on the album."
• Marker was inspired by the guitarist documentary It Might Get Loud. "The night before, I had watched the movie It Might Get Loud, and I was feeling pretty fired up - there's a little Jimmy Page in the song," the Garbage axeman told MusicRadar.
• In 2012, vocalist Shirley Manson told Stylist: "Even as I was spewing the words for the first time, I remember thinking to myself, 'This is how we should sound'. There's a line in the song, "Let's take a torch to the past and the future." That's my mantra; you don't have to be married to who you were. This sense of liberation seems missing in the current musical climate – it seems so overly sexualised now. People like Rihanna and Lady Gaga are sexual, but they're doing it in an interesting way. What scares me is that there's no alternative to that pop world."
  
  She added: "In the last decade we've stuffed our feelings and everything that isn't perfect down inside us. Nobody has spoken about their fears, their frailty or their negative thoughts. I love pop music, but I also want a balance to that. I want to hear what women have to say; there are no gobby, alternative women with guitars on the radio at the moment."
• The song received its first radio broadcast on Steve Lamacq's BBC Radio 6 Music show on March 27, 2012. It was released as the lead single to promote Not Your Kind Of People in the United Kingdom on May 7, 2012.