Songfacts®:

• Nao is an English singer-songwriter who started out as a backing singer for Kwabs and Jarvis Cocker. She also was a featured vocalist on "Superego," a track from Disclosure's UK #1 album Caracal.
• This song is the lead single from her debut album For All We Know. In it, Nao relates a dissolving childhood friendship. "Logically, I understand why it happened, but my heart… I still love her," Nao explained to Genius. "She's my friend. So, I guess I have a little bit of heartbreak over that friendship and it's kind of like grieving it. Honestly, it sounds so much deeper than it was. We all have these best friends when we were younger. You have about 40 in a day. When you do lose a friend or something, you do mourn that person."
• The song originated when Nao was on a boat in India taking some time out. "I just started writing a poem, basically, which was the beginning of 'Bad Blood," she said. "When I got back to London, I put it to some piano chords and that's how the beginning of that song became."
• Nao expanded on the reasons why their friendship ended:
  
  "When you're in your early teens and you're doing crazy stuff, you've found this little piece of independence, and you're just like running away with it. I used to have this best friend and we were stuck to the hip. We used to dream about when we were older. Like, 'Are we going to live in London? Are we going to have apartments with our boyfriends together?' And you create all these stories, because you're still growing and you have a future.
  
  But as you're growing, as a teenager, you take different journeys and you take different paths as well. And that's what happened between me and her. We grew apart and took different journeys. That's the bad blood. We didn't have a cat fight or anything. It was just growing and going on our different journeys, and I guess it's questioning what happened between us."