Songfacts®:

• This is the first track on the Space, EP establishing the concept of the project, which is intergalactic activity. Describing the storyline of the song, lead singer Mike Hranica said: "It's a young woman who has this dream of exploring and this adventurous nature. When the ship crashes because there's a malfunction, she wakes up alone - she's the one survivor on this planet. It ends in a notion of desperation."
• Jonathan Gering, who plays keyboards in the band, came up with this song, which the rest of the band then refined. "When we first started getting it together, the bridge of the song was very clearly an explosion, and from Jon's description, basically the idea of the song is a shuttle or spacecraft flying through space and then it crashes," Mike Hranica explained. "With that, I said it would be very easy to create a character who's the commander of the ship."
• "Planet A" was what Jonathan Gering called the song when he turned in the demo. That ended up being the title; Mike Hranica worked it into the title by having the spaceship crash land on an unknown planet that they called "Planet A."
• The music video was directed by the artist Casey Pierce, who does a lot of abstract work. It follows the astronaut from takeoff until her emergence on Planet A, where she encounters a mysterious cube. Pierce told us: "The cube for me is a limited universe created to help us move and protect us from harsh realities, but it can also become a prison." (For more, see our "behind the video" with Casey Pierce.)