In a May 2013 interview, frontman Jared Leto stated:

I was in India, and I wrote a song called ‘Pyres of Varanasi,’ and it was inspired by a place where they have been cremating bodies on the Ganges river for about 5,000 years. And it’s an incredibly intense place. There were bodies being burned everywhere, bodies going through a funeral procession and being left in the river Ganges. So although it’s about death, there’s something beautiful about it as well, and something that makes you think about life itself and how magical life can be.