Songfacts®:

• This song was inspired by the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks. It tells a hypothesized story about two friends at the Eagles Of Death Metal show and how they tried to save each other as the onslaught was taking place. Frontman Vic Fuentes explained: "I remember the words of one of the guys in Eagles of Death Metal saying that so many people died trying to save their friends and I just thought that was such an amazing sad thing - people trying to save each other. I wrote the song as if I was at the show with my girlfriend or my best friend and s--- went down, what would we be trying to do - what would be going on in our minds."
• Vic Fuentes explained his vision for the song during a video. "It was after the Paris attacks at Bataclan," the frontman explained. "It affected the whole world and everyone was hit hard. I think musicians were hit in a different way, as far as... You know, this is what we do every day, we're up on those stages. And basically, I tried to put a bit of a positive spin on it."
  
  "I would definitely say 'Circles' is probably one of the most meaningful songs we've ever written," he added.
• According to guitarist Tony Perry, Fuentes nearly had other plans for the track. "I remember him talking about actually rewriting that song, he was gonna change the chorus," Perry said. "I remember telling him, 'You really shouldn't, that's my favorite song. It really is awesome the way it is.'"
• The song's music video was directed by Drew Russ who previously helmed the band's 2012 "King for a Day" clip. It finds the band stopping at a rundown old hotel, where they encounter a rather odd innkeeper played by former MTV VJ and current radio host Matt Pinfield.
  
  The visual is loosely based on the 1991 Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase film Nothing But Trouble. Vic Fuentes told Alternative Press, "In that movie there - it's sort of like a slapstick horror movie about trying to escape an old house from an old man that runs the house. So we kind of loosely based it off of that and we kind of adjusted it more to what would we be doing, you know? Everyday we have to check into a hotel on tour and so we kind of based it off of like, 'What if we checked into this hotel and it was just this haunted hotel with this old man who tried to send us through his bag of tricks in his house and capture us.' And it's like he would be doing this for years and all of these bands had disappeared, you know? In this house and we're trying to help each other out of it. So yeah, it's kind of based on this idea for the video."
• The readers of Kerrang voted the video as their favorite of 2016.