Songfacts®:

• Juice WRLD often talked about his mental health struggles in his music, and here the rapper feels so hopeless he's "already dead." Having tried prayer, he's resorted back to his old habit of taking drugs to numb his depression and anxiety. The rapper mixes Hennessy (a French cognac) and Vicodin (an opioid pain reliever) as a temporary coping mechanism. However, this is just a temporary fix, not a cure, and his demons soon return.
• Juice died from an overdose on December 2019, just days after his 21st birthday. Grade A Productions and Interscope Records released his first posthumous album, Legends Never Die, the following July. The raw emotion of the rapper's rhymes in the light of his untimely passing struck a chord with many fans. Legends Never Die was the fifth best-selling album of 2020 in the United States and a huge hit elsewhere.
  
  Juice WRLD first teased "Already Dead" back in 2018. Lil Bibby, the manager of Juice's label, Grade A Productions, had this emotional song in mind for the lead single for the rapper's second posthumous album, Fighting Demons, but the rapper had stored the track away, and for a while Bibby couldn't find it. After months of searching, he tracked the tune down and released it on November 12, 2021.
• Nick Mira and Dorien "DT" Theus came up with the maudlin piano-based beat. The two produced many of Juice's early songs and Mira later helmed many of his hits, including "Lucid Dreams (Forget Me)," "All Girls Are The Same" and "Righteous."
• The Steve Cannon-directed animated video for "Already Dead" sees two samurai versions of Juice WRLD battling against each other. The two cartoon warrior incarnations fight to the finish, leaving trails of destruction in their wake. "This character is named 'Anti-Juice.' He represents the internal struggle Juice faced within himself," Steve Cannon explained in a Vevo Footnotes video. "Anti-Juice regenerating is a metaphor for the resilience of mental health issues. Every time Juice appears to get a leg up on Anti-Juice, he bounces back more fiercely (a classic anime trope)."