Songfacts®:

• "Doomscroller" refers to the tendency to spend an excessive amount of screen time on your phone or computer absorbing negative news. Metric open Formentera with this 10-and-a-half-minute sonic ride into a future that has suddenly arrived. Frontwoman Emily Haines described it to The Sun as "a high-speed chase through modern life."
• Metric didn't set out to make an over-10-minute song. The first half was something guitarist James Shaw and producer Liam O'Neil had been working on. When Haines heard it, she sang her whole part in one take. "But there was something about the song that just felt unfinished," Shaw told Apple Music. "It felt kind of stark - doomscrolling is not the most uplifting feeling!"
  
  Metric wanted to add some sort of redemption, and Haines came in with another piece of music, which they could segue into.
  
  Whatever you do
  Either way we're gonna love you
  
  "Once we got to the place where the two things melded," Shaw added, "I really wanted the ending to feel like a big hug after the whole thing you just went through."
• Metric worked on Formentera during the pandemic, but Haines insists the band wasn't just killing time making music. "It was the opposite," she told NME. "We came out [of this period] not just with like, 'Oh, Metric wrote some more songs' – which is an accomplishment – but we really wanted this to be on a whole other level."
  
  "'Doomscroller' establishes that out of the gate," Haines added. "We were really pushing ourselves to make the thing that will carry us into the next two decades of our career, as opposed to feeling like we're just clinging to the past."
• The Justin Broadbent-directed video is described as "a sonic 10-minute voyage that transports you into a 'high-speed chase through the wild terrain of modern life.'"
  
  "Justin captured rare studio footage of the recording of 'Doomscroller' and we used it like a visual anchor, as evocative places outside the room keep creeping in," said Emily Haines. "These traces of life on earth that appear and disappear throughout the song subtly mirror the shifting moods of the music."