La Dispute wrote and recorded "Wildlife" in pieces to accommodate their intense tour schedule. The album was recorded at two different studios with recording engineers Andrew Everding and Joe Pedulla. They started with the instrumentation of six tracks at Drasik Studios in Chicago; this recording process took place over two weeks. The songwriting featured on the album is distinct from La Dispute's previous releases. Dreyer wrote the stories or the concepts behind each song, and then the band adapted these stories into lyrics and created music to revolve around them. In an interview, Dreyer was asked how the songwriting differs; he said that the lyrics were written before the music was composed. He was quoted as saying: "This time around, we switched the process up entirely. Previous to "Wildlife", we'd always start music first and add vocals later based on the way the song felt. This time around, because we had a more concrete concept going into it, and because we wanted to work even more as a single unit [...]" Dreyer and the rest of La Dispute had expressed interest in writing a conceptual record, but with ambiguity so it would not limit the listener's experience. "Oftentimes, I think records with a linear narrative narrow the ways in which a person can enjoy it, and not everyone wants to sit down and listen to something front to back." When they returned from their touring in Australia in February 2011 they "dropped off the face of the earth" for two months, during which their writing sessions lasted twelve to fourteen hours a day. La Dispute recorded the remainder of the album in a month in StadiumRed in New York City in April 2011. Dreyer wanted to give the album the most organic feel possible by using no artificial reverb or studio techniques that would give the album a synthesized quality. Joe Pedulla stated that he wanted to give the album a more raw and authentic sound: "We were just trying to capture what it would be like for an audience member sitting and listening to a guitar in a room." He also credited Dreyer's vocal range: "Jordan Dreyer has this crazy dynamic range – a 20dB swing from how loud and quiet he gets. So there are some vocal parts with no resonance at all, where he's speaking/singing softly, the room is not echoing, and he sounds close and in-your-face. Then the dynamic swing happens, and we would see how big it can get." When recording vocals, Dreyer makes very long takes, trying to emulate the sound of his voice in live performances.