Disagreements had arisen over the album's content: Frith, Cutler and Krause favoured song-oriented material, while the rest of the band preferred instrumental compositions.

As a compromise, Frith, Cutler and Krause agreed to release the songs already recorded on their own album, Hopes and Fears, under the name Art Bears, with the rest of Henry Cow credited as guests.

[1] Hopes and Fears (1978) thus consisted of Henry Cow songs with the addition of new Art Bears material recorded later by Frith, Cutler and Krause.

It comprised fourteen short songs composed by Frith around texts by Cutler inspired by carvings on the stylobate of Amiens Cathedral.

While similar to Art Bears, the addition of Glandien's electronic music made Domestic Stories a distinctly different album.

The line-up was the same as before, except that Krause, who had agreed to come out of retirement, replaced Eisenberg, who was ill.[4][5] Art Bears's music was often deeply political in content (reflecting the band's socialist leanings) and frequently avant-garde and experimental.

[6] Reviewing The Art Box, BBC Music described it as: "Carefully wrought dissonances, angular folk tunes, sudden shifts in dynamics, dense layers of spectral drones, slabs of noise, topped off with Dagmar's strange, elastic Sprechstimme.

[10] Chris Cutler explains that it was a deliberate out-of-context quote, but that "not too much should be read into this; it just sounds intriguing, has an animal in it, plays with ambiguity and is mildly ridiculous".