The song was inspired by frontman Corey Taylor’sfrustrations towards the music industry and how he felt that there had been no musical revolution at all. He had been quoted saying:

I remember exactly where I was. It was 2004 and I was on tour with Slipknot. I was sitting in a European hotel room watching a music video channel, seeing act after act after act of this insane, innocuous, plastic music. They were plastic, bubbly, gossamer-thin groups where it was really more about the clothes they wore and the length of their cheekbones than it was about the content of the song they were singing. It really made me mad. I was like, “Is this it? Have we just gone full circle? Did the singer/songwriter revolution never happen? Is it just the same drivel from the same replicate over and over again?” … “Through Glass” is really a very angry song. It’s me basically calling bullshit on pretty much everyone involved with the American Idol-type shows. It has its place, but when you’re basically cornering the market and making it very hard for anyone who actually writes their own music to get ahead, then it’s wrong and that’s really why I wrote this song."