Songfacts®:

• "Drown" captures Justin Timberlake's emotional turmoil as he's left adrift in the agony of a broken relationship.
  
  Highly charged songs about heartbreak have been part of Timberlake's repertoire since his 2002 hit "Cry Me A River," but back then he had real-life inspiration: his split from Britney Spears. By the time he released "Drown" in 2024, he had been married to the actress Jessica Biel for 12 years.
• Timberlake co-wrote the emotional ballad with Kenyon Dixon, Amy Allen, and the song's co-producers Louis Bell and Cirkut. The song was released as a promotional single from Everything I Thought It Was on February 23, 2024. The quartet of Timberlake, Allen, Bell and Cirkut also penned the album's lead single, "Selfish," with Theron Thomas.
  
  "'Drown' happened very quickly," Timberlake said in an Instagram video. "Myself, Kenyon Dixon, Amy Allen along with Cirkut and and Louis Bell. It's the first one I actually wrote with Lou Bell and Cirkut. The song wrote itself so quickly. It kind of annoyed me, because sometimes you have this thing like, 'Oh, if you didn't struggle to write the song, maybe it's not worth it.'"
  
  "The more I listened back to it and the more I played it for people, the more it was like, 'No, this sounds like you,'" he continued. "When I think back to songs like that, where I kind of underestimated that ability to have that familiarity or catch on with people, the last time was 'Mirrors.' I sat on that song for, like, five years."
• Timberlake's vocal is the demo vocal. He recorded it line by line as they were writing it, just to demo it out. "The most we listened back to it, the more it had this honesty to it that I didn't want to change anything," he said.
• A friend of Timberlake's inspired the album title. The "Can't Stop The Feeling!" hitmaker told Apple Music's Zane Lowe that after listening to the album, his friend told him, "This sounds like everything I thought I wanted from you."