Songfacts®:

• Imagine Dragons singer Dan Reynolds has struggled most of his life with severe depression, plus ADD and anxiety issues. Here he sings of his brain "running dry of serotonin," which causes his black moods. As the singer feels his depression building up, he finds himself in an internal struggle between being thankful for all his blessings and being dragged down in a dark pit of despair.
• Dan Reynolds wrote this self-love anthem about killing the critic inside him with his Imagine Dragons bandmates Wayne Sermon, Daniel Platzman, and Ben McKee. Reynolds said of the song:
  
  "It's an exorcism of self pity. An examination of my life - finding that I am beyond blessed - and trying to rid myself of all the meaningless things that have burdened me. Killing the part of me that spends its days lamenting about things that bear no real meaning or worth. Finding that at the end of the day only one Dan will prevail, and it's the one that loves myself. Loves my past. My present. Loves my mistakes and problems. My weaknesses. My illness. One that wakes every day grateful for life. That lives fully and is a present for those that I love."
• Imagine Dragons recorded the stomping, punk-leaning song with producer Rick Rubin at his Shangri-LA studio in Malibu. With "Cutthroat," Rubin swings the band away from their rock-pop anthems into more hard rock territory.
• Reynolds told the BBC that "Cutthroat" is likely the angriest song he's ever written. "The original demo was really manic and crazy - but Rick really made me dig into it," said the Imagine Dragons frontman. "He said, 'It's like you went 75% there [but] it needs to go past 75%. It has to go to 100%.' He really believed in pushing the anxiousness of the song to the brink."
• Imagine Dragons released "Cutthroat" along with "Follow You" on March 12, 2021. The two tracks are the band's first music since the 2018 album Origins. Reynolds said that the pair of songs are opposites; "Follow You," he explained, is about "loyalty and love," and Cutthroat" is the reverse "both sonically and thematically," calling it "an exorcism of self-pity."
• Matt Eastin directed the music video, which stars Olivia Munn (X-Men: Apocalypse, The Newsroom) and Adrian Martinez (Sisters, Stumptown). The clip finds Munn in a constantly increasing state of agitation as she experiences a terrible time at the DMV. It acts as a parallel visual of the song's thunderous and frenetic sonic build.
  
  Other videos shot by Eastin for Imagine Dragons include their previous one for "Follow You."