Songfacts®:

• This is the second single and opening track from alternative rock band Mutemath's second studio album, Armistice.
• Mainman Paul Meany explained to Artist Direct how the band penned the songs for the album. "For this record, it usually started in the dining room of this one particular house. The guys would just play there. It began with guitar, drum and bass. I would just listen to them from a nearby control room and when something good would happen, we'd jot it down. We would just begin to piece together some of these jams and begin to build a song from there, which is how 'The Nerve' happened, which was a pretty great moment. It was just playing and holding out the bucket waiting for songs to fall out the sky. A lyrical concept would pop up, and that was it. I would try to write every lyric down really quickly because those good ideas simply happen. Then, we would move on to the next song."
• Drummer Darren King explained the band's name to Spin Magazine: "[Keyboardist-vocalist] Paul [Meany] and I started out as an electronic duo called Math," he recalled. "We thought Math would be easy to remember and easy to print. It looked angular. But we ran into copyright problems because other bands had been called Math before. So we had to come up with something else – this was in 2005 in New Orleans. I had a big notebook full of names and Mutemath was in there. I think one of things that we liked was that it looked really symmetrical in print. Our name looks good on festival bills, you know?"