Fear of Men was formed in early 2011 by Jessica Weiss and Daniel Falvey. For her art degree, Weiss had been creating soundtracks for her short films and she met Falvey at one the exhibitions for her films. Falvey, a guitarist and a fellow art student, liked her recordings and they started working together. Weiss became the lead vocalist and lyricist, while Lin and Anthony joined on bass and drums respectively. In March 2011, they released a four-track cassette entitled the "Hannah Schygulla Demos" on the Sex is Disgusting label and began to perform live locally. In August the band released the single "Ritual Confession" on the Italian Beach Babes label. It was followed in December of that year by the "Alice Munro Demos". Over the course of 2012 Lin was replaced by Robyn Edwards on bass, while they were joined by Michael Miles drums. This created the core of Weiss, Falvey and Miles as a trio that recorded together while bass was added to the live-setting. In June 2012 they release the single "Green Sea" on the Sexbeat label. It was followed by the 7" "Mosaic" October on Too Pure. In February 2013, Kanine Records released a compilation of previous recordings as Early Fragments. It included the previous three singles and one previously unreleased track "Sheer". The album was described as "moving backwards from their most recent dreamy haze to their first art school experiments" by Consequence of Sound. The band also performed at SXSW, Festival Nrmal and the Indietracks festivals, while Edwards was replaced by Alex Flynn-O'Neill. They worked on their debut LP Loom, which was released in May 2014. In a review on Pitchfork described it as "wistful dream pop" while it received an aggregated score of 83 on Metacritic. They preceded to go on tour in North America and Europe supporting The Pains of Being Pure At Heart. After the release of Loom, Weiss began composing new songs while experimenting with electronic sounds. The new material was played live during a short tour supporting Lower Dens in October 2015. This experience changed some of the material as the band "wanted to write an album that would make the stage shake, and we had to work out how we could sound stronger and get our ideas across in a more concise way". By the end of December 2015 the recording had been completed.
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In relation to recording the second album, Falvey commented that "We got a lot more interested in manipulating sounds and building songs with computers, but we had to learn how to combine that with our live performance".
