Songfacts®:

• Prior to starting work on her Honey album in 2015, Robyn had to endure the heartbreak of the death of her friend and collaborator Christian Falk from pancreatic cancer and a split from her boyfriend, photographer Max Vitali.
  
  Here, Robyn sings about the empty space left behind by a loss of a loved one. In a press release, the Swedish singer said: "'Missing U' is a song about this trippy thing that happens when people disappear, it's like they become even more clear and you see them everywhere."
• This was Robyn's first release since 2015, when she teamed up with La Bagatelle Magique for the singles "Love Is Free" and "Set Me Free." The Swedish singer explained she had the long gap in mind when penning the song as it also acts as "a little bit of a message to my fans that I've missed them."
• Robyn created the demo for "Missing U" in the summer 2014 upstairs in her apartment on her laptop along with a LinnDrum machine and a software synth. She told Pitchfork: "I was just interested in these chords that reminded me of something that my parents would listen to in the '80s, when pop music was really soft and warm, like Kate Bush."
• The lyrics for the song took two years to complete, as writing about her heartbreak made Robyn very depressed. She eventually finished them with longtime collaborator Klas Åhlund and Metronomy's Joe Mount. Robyn told Pitchfork:
  
  "My demo of 'Missing U' has the same chords but it's very different. Joseph pulled out this bright sound effect, this feeling of light hitting water, in that arpeggio. He really put his finger on this kind of sadness: It's quite exciting, even though it's really painful. Arpeggiators stretch your brain and make you listen to all the different notes and harmonics in a song, but you can also just have it play a few notes, and then your brain starts filling in the gaps. On this record, the arpeggios are still there, but I tried to make them less even, less stiff, less on the 16th notes, and with a different groove."