In their interview with Zane Lowe for Beats 1 Radio, Sam Smith said that, after their broken relationship,

… the guy I wrote the first record about started to leak back into my mind. … and I didn’t like it.'

They added that ‘I was in Nashville when I wrote this and I woke up and was really angry that morning. There’s an angst in that song’.

In the same interview Sam stated definitively that this was the last time they would write about the man who was the subject of ‘In the Lonely Hour’.