In 2016 Penelope Trappes of The Golden Filter/Lismore rented out a small piano studio in East London for nearly the whole year and set out to write an introspective, trendless, and mostly beatless album. Inspired by albums from This Mortal Coil and Scott Walker, who also sought freedom to work outside of the expectations of their previous work, she limited the instrumentation to mostly an acoustic piano and effects, which left space to expose a lot of emotional vulnerabilities about herself and the people closest to her.