Manchester Orchestra had always prided themselves on their approach. The Atlanta-based band, led by singer/lyricist Andy Hull with Robert McDowell (who is also Hull’s brother-in-law and lifelong friend), had spent their career challenging each other to build a poignant, exhilarating  narrative with each new album and EP. The band had worked relentlessly to cultivate a passionate fan base the old-fashioned way: releasing music, making music videos, and touring (most recently with drummer Tim Very and bassist Andy Prince). Their previous long-player, 2014’s Cope, had even spawned a cover album of itself by its creators, an acoustic- reworking and reimagining of its songs with a heavily  emotional bent that they called Hope. But now — thirty years old, stable, and a frst-time father — Hull found  himself facing a crisis of inspiration. Since the beginning, each subsequent Manchester Orchestra album had been a grand statement for that specifc moment in their career, originated in a desire to push themselves forward creatively. The desire to achieve greatness is often followed  by a need for that same desire to evolve.  So, for a musician  used to writing out of self-refection, what do you sing about when life is good? For a band on record number fve and seeking innovation,  how do you untangle yourself from the past? How do you write songs about being happy?

It was becoming clear that they required a completely new approach from an entirely different sphere and set of faculties — and, lo and behold, just such a moment  arrived when Hull and McDowell were offered the chance to score a movie.

In the midst of the Cope/Hope LP release cycle, the directing duo The Daniels — who had created a dense, theatrical music video for Manchester Orchestra’s “Simple Math” in 2011, winning Vimeo’s “Music Video of the Year” in the process — countered Hull and McDowell’s request for them to work on another video with the idea of scoring the directors’ in-the-works feature flm debut, Swiss Army Man.  They had never written a flm score before, but the pair of musicians happily rose to the challenge. The Daniels’ immediate guideline was: “Cool, don’t use any instruments.” In the project, Hull and McDowell  recognized an opportunity to leave their comfort zone and to push emotion to new heights. “Cope was very much  a record where we knew what we wanted and it was a goal in our heads we could chase; that was followed by the polar opposite in Hope. But once we started work on the soundtrack, we threw the textbook out and started approaching music against our instincts,” says McDowell. “I think the score kind of was like going back and getting a doctorate. Once we fnished it, there was this whole new realm of situations and sounds that we could go down.” Swiss Army Man was a weird — albeit cult — Sundance hit, and the flm’s New York Times-lauded “marvelously melancholic music” earned rave reviews around the world. Riding that excitement, Hull and McDowell  decamped to a cabin near Asheville,  North Carolina, with bandmates Very and Prince to write a new record. Inspired by their experience creating the score, they seized the chance to rethink Manchester Orchestra’s typical methods of working.