Songfacts®:

• In "Combat Baby," Metric frontwoman Emily Haines implores an unnamed soldier to return home. It was released in 2003, the start of The Iraq War.
• This is the first single Metric released. It came off their debut album, Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? It didn't chart.
• The video for the song has a claymation version of Haines watching television, where scenes of Metric are interspersed with animated figures of politicians and soldiers.
• The line "don't go quietly" alludes to the Dylan Thomas poem Do not go gentle into that good night. In it, Thomas urges his father to fight against death and to stop giving in so easily.
• Haines explained to Better Propaganda the irony of Metric using the pop format (especially in this song with lyrics such as "Let's drink to the military" and videos of G.I. Joes getting shot in the head and bleeding all over the ground) to take some jabs at the social order and consequently freezing themselves out of the American mainstream media: "Well, I think the irony is twofold, in that we are, in many ways, an American band, because the two other members of the band are from Texas, and we all met in New York. And I'm in fact dual citizen, my parents are American, they're ex patriots. And James is also... um, whatever with his green card and stuff... So this band was definitely formed in America. And I think the things that we comment on, we feel like we're participating in. I would love to have a more outsider feeling, but I recognize that every dollar I spend in America goes towards things like the military... We feel complicit in the things that we're concerned about." >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Bertrand - Paris, France