Divers

The album was revealed on 10 August 2015 with its first song, Sapokanikan, and Drag City announced the track listing the same day. Newsom told Entertainment Weekly she spent a year or two on the instrumental arrangements and overdubs, and that making it was probably the most fun she had had making a record. The magazine reported nearly a dozen keyboards and synthesizers, among them clavichords, Mellotrons and Marxophones, and members of the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra play on it. Kim Keever's work is on the cover and packaging.

Steve Albini and Noah Georgeson engineered it, Georgeson produced and mixed it with Newsom, John Golden mastered it, and Nico Muhly and David Longstreth wrote orchestral arrangements for Anecdotes and Time, as a Symptom. Her brother Peter Newsom played drums on Leaving the City and Time, as a Symptom. All the songs are Newsom's except Same Old Man, which is traditional.

It sold 14,000 copies in its first week, against 9,000 for Ys, and gave her a first number one on Billboard's Alternative Albums chart. It also reached number two on the Vinyl Albums chart with 3,000 LPs. Metacritic scores it 88 from 33 reviews. Laura Snapes at Pitchfork wrote that it is a love letter in the form of a reckoning with death, and noted that its last word, trans-, loops back to the first word of Anecdotes, sending. The Guardian placed it tenth on its best albums of 2015.