The album was his first set of newly-recorded music since We Should Change into the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves (2011). Recorded in two years at his Austin, Minnesota dwelling, most of its subject matter concerns apocalyptic themes impressed by the newsfeed of world events he garnered whereas making the LP. A few of its track buildings and melodies had been created with the aid of an artificial neural community. The album obtained generally favorable critiques from critics, and was honored on numerous year-finish lists by publications reminiscent of Uncut, The Wire, Truth, Memory Wave and Clash journal. Commercially, the album peaked number 14 on Billboard's American Heatseekers Albums chart. Music videos have been created for its three singles ("The Combine", "Teenage Witch", and "Touchdown"). Artwork was designed by Lia Sued Cabral. It features a typeface referred to as Shatter, designed by Vic Carless. After the favorable response to Maus' earlier studio album We Must Grow to be the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves (2011)-which was unprecedented for him-he became extra extensively accepted as an outsider artist.

He did not launch any new music for the subsequent six years. Two years had been devoted to ending his dissertation, while one other two were spent studying how to construct modular synthesizers. His 338-page thesis "Communication and Management", which mentioned the affect of expertise on social management, was accomplished and submitted in 2014, and he was thereby awarded his PhD in political science from the University of Hawaii. During Maus' absence, various contingents of widespread music started indulging in throwbacks to 1980s culture. I feel largely the details that I’m most centered on are precisely the kind which can be going to be lost on most people. Maus wrote and produced virtually all of Screen Memories by himself in his Austin, Minnesota residence studio, MemoryWave Guide nicknamed the "Funny Farm". The entire instruments Maus used for the album were manufactured by himself. The album builds upon the 1980s-inspired lo-fi of his previous albums. What I did was prepare a neural community on a bunch of harmonic sequences after which noticed what it spit back out to me.

I also messed around with Markov chains by feeding them 1000's and 1000's of chants. I messed around with a easy process where you are taking an integer sequence and let the numbers one-by way of-six designate the scale degree of a mode and then I added the extra factor of collapsing each consecutive, each I-iii-V I-IV-V triad into it. I put in place. The chaos just kind of shook the little machine that I made. I by no means heard the chaos as such, however I noticed the in any other case invisible body that I made being shook by the integer sequence. Display screen Recollections was completed shortly earlier than the November 2016 US presidential election. He had deliberate for the music to be guitar-oriented, but he "may never get it to work." Ultimately, the album's solely guitar-heavy songs have been "Find Out" and "Bombs Away". The latter is the one track on the album that he did not write alone; it's a cover of a music by Holy Shit, a duo that formerly consisted of Ariel Pink and Matt Fishbeck.

Display screen Reminiscences is named after the Freudian idea of display recollections, which refers to a distorted memory from childhood. In response to critic Gabriela Tully Claymore, Display Reminiscences displays a more "foreboding" tone than Maus' previous data. Maus didn't interact in much social interplay whereas creating the album, and he solely realized concerning the darkish world political climate via newsfeeds. The lyrics features references to aspects of common tradition equivalent to Jean-Luc Picard and Masters of the Universe. In June 2017, Maus announced a summer time tour, which turned his first public performances since 2012, and steered that new music could be released soon. It was his first solo tour with a dwell band, featuring his brother Joseph Maus on bass, Minneapolis musician Luke Darger on keyboards, and Jonathan Thompson on drums. That very same day, the LP's lead single, "The Combine," and its Tina Rivera-directed music video, "a lo-fi, psychedelic imaginative and prescient of farmlands being harvested" as Stereogum summarized, was launched. On October 12, the music video and single for "Teenage Witch" premiered.