
The song was made available as a single on March 3, 2008. This would be the first time Chester Bennington used profanity on any studio material after "System" from the soundtrack to Queen of the Damned. It also contains the second most amount of profanity of any Linkin Park song (the most being "When They Come For Me", a song from the band's fourth album, A Thousand Suns) with the word "fuck" being featured in the chorus and the bridge. It starts with a distinctive jingle sound during the verses and intro, generated by the jingling of guitarist Brad Delson's ring of keys and a steady clapping beat by Mike Shinoda. I’m just going to rearrange the song around what you just did.”" And he’s like, “I don’t know how long just to scream that part.” I’m like, “Dude, I’m not touching that vocal. He had a ton of control, and he got to that point and just let it go well into the next chorus. He was having a really good day in the studio.

So he just held the note as long as he possibly could. We got to the bridge, and he knew that he was supposed to scream “Put me out of my misery,” but he didn’t know how many measures that part was. I had written a lot, or most of, those lyrics, I think, and he had just learned them he was reading them off of a piece of paper. I had organized the song, and Chester hadn’t gotten familiar with the structure of the song when he was singing it. I think it’s a 17- or 18-second-long scream. "One of our most notorious moments is this big scream on the bridge of “Given Up”. Speaking in a 2020 interview with, Mike Shinoda would explain how the 17-second scream came to be: The scream was often split into two, eight-second long screams when performed live allowing Bennington to catch his breath, although he has completed the full scream in various live performances. It notably features a seventeen-second-long scream by Chester Bennington before the final chorus, as well as a steady guitar riff for the choruses of the song. "Given Up" is the heaviest song on the album. The performance of the song is available on the " Bleed It Out" single.


Live performances of these three songs at the AOL sessions were released on AOL on May 5, 2007. "Given Up", along with " No More Sorrow" and the hit single " What I've Done", made its live debut on Apin Berlin, Germany.
