Gallagher began to have drug-induced panic attacks during this period. His depression and paranoia inspired the song "Gas Panic!", subsequently included on the 2000 album Standing on the Shoulder of Giants. He said he stopped using illicit drugs on 5 June 1998. Gallagher stated in 2001, "I liked drugs, I was good at them. But I'd had panic attacks for about a year and I stopped because I wanted to. After you make the decision, it is quite easy." Of the period between 1993 and 1998, Gallagher said, "I can hardly remember a thing."[30] In a 2020 interview Gallagher said that once, during that period, he ended up in a hospital in Detroit for an overdose, and that the doctors didn't understand the situation because of their misunderstanding for Gallagher's accent. He told about the experience: "You know, imagine having the psychosis and going to a hospital and having to go through a metal detector and someone asking you what's wrong with you? And they don't understand the words you're saying because of your accent. They're just like, 'Okay, I'm gonna go get someone else. Hang on a minute'".[44]

The songs are more personal, and there is less of the Supersonic-style sloganeering. Noel stopped writing lyrics "that just rhymed or sounded good. It's hard to write a really deeply personal song and then give it to someone else who's five years younger than you to express it down the microphone. But Liam's got to understand that, from now on, the songs are going to get more meaningful to me and probably less meaningful to him. And he'll understand as he gets older."

The way Noel describes it, it's hard to know which was more insane, being on a deranged, drugs-driven world tour or being at home in London, where the party continued in much the same way. The new album is more about the comedown than the highs. Where Did It All Go Wrong? is a track written just before Noel and Meg, both now 32, moved out of Supernova Heights, their home in Belsize Park, north London.

Their house had turned into a nightclub, he says, "a pretty good one at that. The bar was always open, the door was always open, there were more people coming in and out than I ever got to know. I must have wasted years sitting there with the curtains closed talking about bullishit - aliens, pyramids, debating 'did they really land on the moon, let's watch the footage again in slow motion' or 'crop circles - what's that all about?'" One morning, he looked in the mirror at his yellow skin and popping eyes, unable to focus, with a load of strangers in the kitchen, and thought, "Oh fuck, how did we get here?"

Sunday Morning Call is about a particular person on a self-destruct mission, who is "too rock'n'roll for their own good". My guess is Kate Moss. "Could be - she's one of my mates, but I wouldn't like to say who it's about." Did Noel never think of checking himself into the Priory, the usual drying-out route favoured by the rich and famous? "I never understand people who spend £50,000 a month to cure a £10,000-a-month habit. And it creates another shit storm and a media circus, and people lie about why they're going in, and say they're 'stressed out'." Instead, Noel and Meg sold their London house and moved to Buckinghamshire. He took the phone off the hook and stayed in. Gas Panic, the new album's darkest track, was written while weaning himself off cocaine - "going cold turkey, without wanting to sound too dramatic about it" - in the midst of a night-time panic attack. "It's basically a paranoid drugs song."