The music and title of the song were written by Conor Curley, trying to relay the spirit of Nabokov’s writing musically.
And the lyrics, by Grian Chatten, were described in a Rolling Stones interview as a “ a perverse take on … it’s compromise in a relationship sort of rendered as civility. It’s an exaggeration of a compromise that’s necessary to a functioning relationship, to the point where it sounds pathetic. I just wanted to kind of put myself in that position, in that song, to express how it feels to no longer have absolute independence and autonomy over your life, when you decide that you are in love and you want to share your life with someone. There’s lines like, “I will be your dog in the corner, and I would light your cigarette.” It’s just this subservience that I wanted to use in order to express the element of compromise that’s necessary.”