In 2009, Vig and Manson met at the funeral of Pablo Castelaz, the six-year-old son of Dangerbird Records founder Jeff Castelaz, and had a conversation where, according to Vig, "we felt like we had some unfinished business, and we realized how precious life is and how important music has been in our lives." Manson suggested calling guitarists Duke Erikson and Steve Marker to get together and write some songs. One week later, the group informally convened in Los Angeles, where they laughed, drank, and reminisced of the old days, leaving behind the tensions among them and general weariness that was partly responsible for their 2005 breakup; they set up their equipment and "started fucking around." "We were all pleased to notice on the first day there just didn't seem to be any personal tensions," Vig recalled. "Enough time had passed that any sort of weirdness or tension that had risen between us all had dissipated. So it was easy. There was no one telling us what to do. We weren't signed to a label. We were between managers. So we made this on our own terms." In that session, the group wrote the song "Battle In Me". In mid-2010, the entire group were in Los Angeles for a birthday, where Manson suggested they book a studio and spend time writing. Along with Garbage's long time engineer and Manson's husband Billy Bush, the band, as Bush described, "hung out for a couple weeks, drank some wine and played a bunch of music”. Three or four song ideas came together during this time. "But we didn't go right into making-a-record mode", Erikson recalled. "It took a bit of time for us to realize that we were going to make an album." Erikson described reconvening as a piecemeal process, saying that it informally began with the first phone conversations among them since their hiatus, as they discussed playing together again. After convening, and composing and performing song ideas together through multiple sessions, they then decided to move forward with the band and embark on a full-length album. The project took off in February 2011, when Manson called Vig proposing to reunite the band and try making a new record. Manson convoked the group out of an eagerness "to make loud music again". "I'm a loud person", she proclaimed; "I love noise and aggression. I crave contact. I needed to make that connection again.