Atlas

After touring for Days ended, the band took a break in late 2012 while Courtney married and wrote songs. They spent eight or nine months writing before recording began, and had played new material in their shows from mid-2012 and through 2013.

A friend suggested Jim O'Rourke as producer, which interested a band that admired his work on Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Believing he would be hard to reach, they took their label's suggestion of Tom Schick, who had co-produced Wilco's The Whole Love and was house engineer at Wilco's studio, The Loft in Chicago. Wilco was on tour and let the band use the studio and its gear, a first for any band without Wilco present. Jeff Tweedy visited and enthused about a song that did not make the album.

With Pollis on drums the band could record basic tracks live instead of overdubbing one at a time. Kallman, formerly of Girls, was brought in for more proficient keyboard parts and wrote his own. The album was recorded at The Loft and the Magic Shop in New York, mixed at the Magic Shop and mastered by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound.

The cover is a mural by the Polish artist Stefan Knapp for the Alexander's department store in Paramus, New Jersey, later bought by the Bergen Museum of Art and Science. Metacritic scores the album 78 out of 100 from 33 reviews, Pitchfork named it among its 100 best albums of the decade so far, and it debuted at number 34 on the Billboard 200.