Composition
"Numb" runs for 4:20 (4 minutes, 20 seconds). According to Hal Leonard Corporation's sheet music published at Musicnotes.com, it is played in common time at a tempo of 91 beats per minute. It is an industrial rock-influenced song featuring a noisy backdrop of sampled, rhythmic noises, including "arcade sounds", and a Walkman rewinding. One of the samples is from Leni Riefenstahl's 1936 propaganda film Triumph of the Will of an 11-year-old Hitler Youth boy playing a bass drum at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin; a video clip of the sample was used as on-screen imagery during future concerts on the band's Zoo TV Tour. The Edge sings lead vocals, providing a monotone list of "don't" commands: "Don't move / Don't talk out of time / Don't think / Don't worry / Everything's just fine". Mullen's backing vocals were the first occasion that he sang on a U2 song. Bono's contributed "Fat Lady" falsetto vocals, which he provided on other Zooropa songs, as well. "Numb"'s various sounds were meant to "recreate that feeling of sensory overload", a theme prevalent on the Zoo TV Tour. Similarly, The Edge's lyrics "tapped into many of the ideas behind Zoo TV, the sense that we were being bombarded by so much information that you find yourself shutting down and unable to respond".
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