Songfacts®:

• Over enticing synth instrumentals, Phoenix vocalist Thomas Mars sings of humanity's impending judgment day. The title and lyric "Alpha Zulu" came from a phrase frontman Thomas Mars heard a pilot repeating over the radio during a bumpy, storm-addled flight. The urgency of the phrase inspired this track. "I remember being in the cockpit of a small airplane, flying over a turbulent area with the headphones on, and ground control calling, 'Alpha Zulu, Alpha Zulu, Alpha Zulu' - which to me sounded like 'mayday,'" Mars told Apple Music. "That stuck with me while we were writing new songs for the next album."
• This turbulent song is one of a batch of tracks the Phoenix quartet wrote for their seventh album. "When we started writing 'Alpha Zulu,' all of our ideas came very fast and out of nowhere," guitarist Christian Mazzalai told Apple Music. "Even the guitar solo we ended up using was from the very first take."
• Released on June 1, 2022, "Alpha Zulu" marks the French rock outfit's first new music since "Identical," a track they recorded for the soundtrack of the 2020 movie On the Rocks.
• "Alpha Zulu" topped Billboard's Adult Alternative Airplay Chart. It was Phoenix' second #1 on the tally, following "Identical" in 2020.
• This is the title track of Phoenix's Alpha Zulu album. The French group recorded the record in Paris' Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which is located within the Palais du Louvre. The museum was empty at the time because of the pandemic. "We felt it would be a fantastic adventure to create something out of nothing in a museum," guitarist/keyboardist Laurent Brancowitz said. "And so with the pandemic, we could live exactly this scene - to be alone in an empty museum."
  
  "I was a bit afraid, when there was too much beauty around us, that to create something could be a bit hard," added guitarist Christian Mazzalai. "But it was the opposite: we couldn’t stop producing music. In these first 10 days, we wrote almost all of the album."