Songfacts®:

• Zayde Wolf specializes in music that gets your heart pumping - his tunes show up in a lot of video games and sports-related productions. "Madness" is along these lines, inspired by some of his favorite conflicted characters: Kylo Ren, Jon Snow and Batman. It's also a release from the coronavirus pandemic, which was easing up when the song was released in March 2021. "I wanted to channel all of that pain and frustration," he said. "All of that madness, and use it for fuel."
• Zayde Wolf is the pseudonym of Dustin Burnett, who got his first drum machine around 1996 and immediately tried to program "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails. That sound is an influence here.
  
  "I wasn't necessarily thinking industrial, but I can hear an industrial feeling in some parts of the sound and vibe," he said on the Songfacts Podcast. "In the opening sequence, I wanted something that felt like it continued to build. I wanted to take modern hip-hop sounds with these wavy guitar and keyboard sounds and mix it with a Hans Zimmer soundtrack."
• Wolf used an interesting production technique in this song to keep the energy building. He told Songfacts: "There's the sequence of four chords and then four chords again with the last chord being different both of those times. There's an interwoven note that just keeps growing throughout the whole thing. The chord is getting more complex as it goes along because I'm adding to the top and bottom because I want that one first note to continue to grow until the highest note. So it carries across the entire vocal if I solo out all the other string instruments and things in there.
  
  I wanted to do something like that, which you see a lot in Hans Zimmer tracks, where he takes some atonal tone and he runs it over and across where it feels like it never really lets you down. I wanted to feel like we kept going, kept going, kept going, until that first "madness" break where the drums crack and it gets chaotic."
• "Madness" was the second single (following "Back At It") from Zayde Wolf's third album, Neon Blood Type. It was released in March 2021 to coincide with the "March Madness" basketball tournament and came with a video featuring the basketball player Jordan Southerland, known for his spectacular dunks.