In a Rolling Stone article in the form of an expansive oral history of OK Computer, lead singer Thom Yorke and producer Nigel Godrich offered the following insight into the song’s meaning and composition:

Yorke:

I was really frightened of cars back then, but “Airbag” was almost the opposite of that. If you get into a crash or a potentially disastrous situation and walk away, you feel a thousand times more alive regardless of what that is. It’s more about that. I was also sort of experimenting with the way that Michael [Stipe] wrote lyrics where you’ve got this thing of semi-nonsense, but when you add them together, it has a cumulative expression of something."

Godrich:

The drum loop on that song was inspired by DJ Shadow. It’s a departure from a rock band. What happened was I told Thom and Phil to sit there for a couple of hours and create a drum loop. And a day and a half later, they were like, “OK, we’ve got it.” But it wasn’t very exciting sounding, so I ran it through Jonny’s pedal board. And we just did three takes of him just like doing all sorts of shit to it and we put it all in."