Songfacts®:

• The origins of "Peace Sign" lie in a 2021 jam session at Ride co-vocalist Mark Gardener's OX4 studio. Originally dubbed "Berlin," the track featured Gardener on guitar, Laurence Colbert on drums, Steve Queralt on bass, and Andy Bell weaving textures with a Prophet 5 synth. Half a year later, Bell revisited the recording, transforming it into the fast-paced, anthemic song we hear today.
• Bell took inspiration from the 2021 American documentary The Alpinist, a portrait of the fearless free climber Marc-André Leclerc. During the film, he flashes the peace sign before free climbing insane rock faces.
  
  "It's a crazy documentary," Gardener told The Sun. "It would be nice if more people were flashing the peace sign around again."
• Lyrically, the song is inspired by the obsessions of people like Lecleric. "It's nothing to do with war," Bell told The Sun. "It's more about how obsessive creatives and their partners navigate their lives."
• "Peace Sign" serves as the opening salvo for Interplay, Ride's seventh studio album. Written and recorded during the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, the record was produced by the band themselves alongside Richie Kennedy.
  
  "The title celebrates the fact that we all worked together to make this record," Bell told The Sun. "We needed much more tolerance, patience, compromise and cooperation this time around. It felt like we were working against the odds a lot of the time, so it's a real achievement that we ended up with an album at all."
  
  "It was just the band in the room," Gardner added, "and we were playing and getting songs together in a similar way to when the band first started and there was a lot of interplay between us with ideas and people contributing different bits and pieces."