m b v

Kevin Shields began recording what became m b v in 1996, after Debbie Googe and Colm Ó Cíosóig had left the band, and called it half-finished when the sessions ended in 1997. He resumed in 2006 when the band reunited, combining the 1996 and 1997 recordings with new instrumentation. Final vocals, bass and drums were recorded in 2011 and 2012, and She Found Now was the only song recorded completely from scratch in 2012. The album was recorded on two-inch 24-track tape and mixed on half-inch tape, and the band said no digital processing was involved. Mastering was finished on 21 December 2012, and more material was recorded at Grouse Lodge in County Westmeath in January 2013.

Shields told The Quietus before release that it would not sound like Loveless but more like Isn't Anything. The Beach Boys' unfinished Smile influenced the way he composed, and drum and bass influenced one song. Alexis Petridis of The Guardian placed Wonder 2 fifth and Only Tomorrow tenth in his 2023 list of the band's songs and called Wonder 2 the only released result of their 1990s drum and bass experiments.

At a warm-up show at Electric Brixton on 27 January 2013 Shields told the audience the album might be out in two or three days. It appeared on the band's relaunched website at 11:58 GMT on 2 February, and the site crashed within minutes. The album was later streamed on YouTube and physical copies followed on 22 February. Metacritic scored it 87 from 46 reviews. Mark Richardson of Pitchfork wrote that the band had made another album from the toolkit of Loveless, "one that is stranger and darker and even harder to pin down". Jason Heller of The A.V. Club gave it an A minus, and Petridis gave it five stars in The Guardian.