Songfacts®:

• The title track of Megadeth's fourteenth studio album premiered exclusively on the Full Metal Jackie radio show, and was released on April 23, 2013 on iTunes. Frontman Dave Mustaine explained the origins of the song to Jack Mehoff of the Colorado Springs, Colorado radio station 94.3 KILO. "That song itself is a little bit of an older chord progression," he said, "and I was listening through some old riffs from a while ago and found that song, added a couple of little pieces to it to make it... to complete the song, and before you knew it, the song was done."
  I was really excited about it," added Mustaine. "And, you know, sometimes when you're writing a song, you know, you find yourself having to scratch your head and come up with parts and stuff like that. And this was one of those songs that when it was done it was kind of like, 'Oh, wow, it's done.' That's only happened a couple other times in my career. It happened with ' In My Darkest Hour.' I sat down and I wrote that all in one fell swoop. And then the song 'Use The Man.'"
• During an interview with the Shockwaves HardRadio podcast, Mustaine explained that the song drew some inspiration from the search for the Higgs boson at CERN and particle colliders, but is mostly about hanging out and taking the proverbial high road until the end of the world. He stated: "I was up in Santa Barbara, and USA Today, as a newspaper, I started reading a long time ago because it had Sudoku in it. I'm not really down with a lot of the viewpoints of the newspaper, but I kind of got used to reading it because of the puzzles in it - 'cause I love word puzzles; I like to enrich my word power. And there was a story in there about how they finally had identified the mass that goes around the molecules and stuff; it's called the Higgs Boson and we had done that with the Super Collider. And I thought, 'Wow, that's a really cool story.'"
  
  "Actually, the stuff's called the 'God particle.'" He continued. "And I thought, knowing how closed-minded people are with my faith and thinking that that's gonna change who I am as a person - which it did - and that that would also correlate into changing my guitar playing, which it didn't, I didn't wanna have a song called 'God Particle', because every village has its idiots, and unfortunately for me, a bunch of them follow me on the Internet. So we opted to call it 'Super Collider'. And this first song is kind of, like, a song about no matter how bad things get, come with me, we'll take the high road and we'll hang out and have a great time and we'll stick together until the end of the world, so to speak, when the world explodes like a Super Collider. Because the whole theory of the super collider is atoms swirling into one another at millions of miles an hour, I guess."
• Here are three more songs on our database inspired by the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, which located the Higgs Boson "God Particle."
  "Munich" by The Fray.
  "Higgs Boson Blues" by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds.
  "Supercollider" by Radiohead.
• Mustaine told Guitar World magazine: "That song kind of came from that 'Symphony Of Destruction' corner of my mind. You can't always play aggressive, thrashy stuff. Sometimes those aren't even songs; they're like musical rams. But because I'm not a pop guy, I'm also not really comfortable playing sing-along songs. To me, 'Symphony Of Destruction' made sense like a normal song - a verse-chorus-verse-chorus kind of thing. It's written the way a real songwriter would write the song, instead of just taking all these musical twists and turns."
• The song's music video was filmed on May 10, 2013 in the Los Angeles area. California-based model, actress, singer and songwriter Hunter Elizabeth plays the lead role in the clip, which she says is "about a high-school couple still loving each other after all the years after graduation, and at the 10-year reunion, both characters find themselves successful (a model and a mathematician) and still very in love."
• Mustaine told the Shockwaves/HardRadio podcast about the album's artwork: "I love the artwork that we have for this record - it's the Hadron Collider, and that is a remarkable machine. And if you look at the Super Collider, the thing itself - whether it does a damn bit of good or not, nobody really knows; I don't know how it's gonna correlate to lowering gas prices or anything like that, or getting people to stop trying to run everybody's lives right now and the dumbing down of America... But it's really cool if you look at how big it is. A lot of pictures on the 'Net will show this enormous machinery and guys the size of ants next to it. And the one picture that we used for our cover was, like I said, the Hadron Collider and it's just beautiful stuff, man."
• Some fans criticised this song, claiming it was too poppy. However Mustaine purposely penned it as a radio-friendly track. He explained to Classic Rock Revisited: "Here's the thing… It is the first track for our new record label, which is a major label, they love the band and we showed them that, not only can we write commercial metal pop songs that people can't do anymore, because their either afraid, or they sound like they are hacking up a chicken bone; they just don't know how to do it."
  
  "We also have the super-heavy stuff on there," Mustaine continued, "and I think that is good because it really shows them everything we are capable of. I think it also opens up a door to a lot of people who just don't like metal. They are going to listen to that and think, 'I like that one song,' and they are going to get the record and listen to the rest of the album and go, 'Man, I love this style of music. I've been missing out for a long time.' Then Dave has introduced another person to the metal community and it becomes like that shampoo commercial where they tell two friends and so on and so on."
• The song failed to reach any Billboard chart, which was a disappointment to the band as it had been released as Super Collider's lead single. Megadeth bassist Dave Ellefson admitted in a 2018 interview with Ireland's Overdrive that in retrospect, the band made the wrong choice.
  
  "Looking back, the first single off Super Collider was too light and I really think we should have come out of the gate with a heavier song choice," he said. "Once fans hear a lighter track, they become prejudiced towards the whole record and the mindset is almost set in stone from that moment onwards, kind of like a first-impressions-last-forever-type scenario."