I wanted “Anthem” to sound like an evil march. Like you knew that someone with bad intentions was coming. One thing that Jordan loves to do and is becoming known for is [to] take something you always assumed was safe or innocent and turn it into something else. The children’s voices is one example—Jordan wanted to start with them because he thought it would be super scary. The reason the lyrics are nonsense has everything to do with Us, which is we want to communicate the message that there’s a group of people who are organizing, but we don’t want the audience to understand their purpose. We want the audience to find that out later, along with the lead characters. The best lyrics of any song you love aren’t the obvious ones—they’re the poetic ones open to interpretation. You’re forced to listen with your emotions and your instincts rather than your intellect.

• Michael Abel, 2019 Interview with Slate Magazine

We had always agreed that the lyrics would just be nonsense, and we wouldn’t try to choose a language. But when it came time to write the lyrics, I realized the obvious, which is that there’s no such thing as nonsense. Everything that comes out of a voice means something, even if it’s a moan or a sigh. Suddenly I had new respect for Dr. Seuss and Lewis Carroll. I ended up just choosing vowels that are very easy to sing. By the time I ruled out all the difficult sounds, I had a little nonsense language of my own. When I was worried that something was actually a word, I would Google the syllable just to make sure it didn’t have a secret meaning. They sound like Latin only because they’re sounds that we’re used to making.

• Michael Abel, 2019 Interview with Slate Magazine