Songfacts®:

• Frontwoman Karen O told the New Musical Express January 17, 2009, with a grin: "I figured if we were going to write a dance song it should be about heads bouncing on the floor and murder and slaughter."
• "Heads Will Roll" was the second single from the third Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, It's Blitz!, following "Zero." Both songs were a major stylistic shift for the band, whose first two albums were filled with guitar-fueled punkish rockers (although their breakthrough song, "Maps," from their first album, is a sensitive ballad). For It's Blitz!, guitarist Nick Zinner switched it up and made keyboards and synthesizers the lead instruments, resulting in danceable, EDM-style songs.
  
  It worked out well for the band. They didn't lose many core fans but gained many new ones. "Heads Will Roll" got more popular over time and new listeners discovered it on social media and in remixes.
• The band wrote this song in the same session that produced another It's Blitz! track, "Hysteric." Nick Zinner told Billboard magazine: "That was actually one of the last songs we wrote for the record. I think we always wanted to have a guilty-pleasure dance song; that was it, really. It came quickly, and it was just fun to write. When we were over playing in Europe, it's definitely the song people are reacting the strongest to, like freaking out when we play it."
• The cast of the TV series Glee performed "Heads Will Roll" as a mash-up with Michael Jackson's "Thriller" on the episode The Sue Sylvester Shuffle, which ran after the Super Bowl on February 6, 2011. Released as a single, it reached #38 in the US, which is higher than any Yeah Yeah Yeahs song has ever climbed.
• The music video takes place in what look like a combination dungeon/nightclub/supper club. A lupine dancer shows up and busts out some Michael Jackson moves before turning murderous. It was directed by Richard Ayoade, who is best known as an actor on the British TV series The IT Crowd. He has also directed videos for Vampire Weekend ("Oxford Comma") and Arctic Monkeys ("Fluorescent Adolescent").
• In 2010, Showtime used this song in promos for the new season of their show The Tudors, promising lots of decapitation.
• The Canadian DJ A-Trak did a remix in 2010 that proved very popular, garnering over 100 million views on YouTube and even more streams on Spotify. This remix is used in the 2012 movie Project X.