The album represented a departure from their 2018 effort Resistance Is Futile. The album announcement made clear that the new record would avoid tackling the COVID-19 pandemic, with Bradfield clearly stating that doing that would just "add insult to injury". Furthermore, about writing in lockdown, James said: "The escape was literally checking to see that the world around you wasn't crumbling when you wrote a song. Lockdown had the element of a waking dream for a lot of people, especially the first one last year. Writing music was a way of pinching myself to say, 'There's still a part of life that works in the same way that it did, albeit in a strange way'". Wire shared that he coped well with this issue: "I'm a very patient and lonely person," he admits. "I can deal with isolation and have always embraced utter boredom quite easily. You see the tragedy and agony unfolding around you and it feels a bit glib to say something like that".
Another event that affected the process of making the album was the death of both of Wire's parents. Having been sick during the making of Resistance Is Futile, his father died in the summer after its release. Wire said: "Having the parents that I had is probably the greatest thing that ever happened in my life. I really liked them; I didn't just love them. I liked talking to them, I'd speak to them every day. They were highly engaged, important, funny people." He credited them with his best traits: "Rage from my dad, he was a mental and physical force. And from my mum, kindness and femininity, an appreciation of aesthetic and the bliss of just sitting down and watching TV together".
While Bradfield learned to play piano during the lockdown, Wire's approach to the lyrical side changed, becoming more introspective and personal: "The lockdown pushed me into facing my own horrors, rather than the horrors outside." The songs that emerged from those sessions, which make up the album "are internal galaxies, of exploration within myself. I think they're the most personal lyrics I've ever written." Also having to confront the loss of his parents, it "allowed me to go deep into myself", the loss "overhung the lyrics". Musically, Wire stated: "I think it's got traces of Lifeblood and Futurology, but I think it is a step into a new dimension. It's got the high modernism of Futurology and the underplayed, glacial power of Lifeblood. It's very much framed within ABBA's 'Waterloo' and Echo & the Bunnymen's 'Bring On the Dancing Horses'." He concluded: "I'm not going to pretend that we're reinventing the wheel in terms of modernity, but it's definitely framed within that era of time."
The band revealed that there were not many songs to pick from for the new record. Wire reflected: "If it didn't feel like it could be on the album, we were either dumping it or stowing it away so there's three or four. There's one James wrote called 'Eternalised' that he didn't think was up to the mark. The two extra tracks on the Japanese version of the album are really good actually. 'My Drowning World' in particular. There's one I wrote called 'Time of Reckoning' which didn't make the cut either. But we weren't writing masses and masses".
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