In 2018, Death Cab for Cutie released its ninth studio album, Thank You for Today, which was the first to feature new members Dave Depper and Zac Rae, who joined the band in 2015, following the departure of longtime guitarist and producer Chris Walla.

At the tail end of an extensive and successful tour in support of the album, the band issued a stopgap extended play, titled The Blue EP in 2019, which combined newly written material – recorded with producer Peter Katsis – with leftover songs from the Thank You for Today sessions.

For half of Asphalt Meadows, the band employed tactics to write material remotely, utilizing Dropbox to send files back and forth.

Gibbard wrote the song with former band members Chris Walla, Nathan Good and Michael Schorr in mind, noting: "This is my life's work.

The post-rock inflected "Foxglove Through the Clearcut" anchors the middle of the record, and centers around a slow-building spoken word monologue interspersed with crashing guitar work.

[15] Tatiana Tenreyro at Spin called it their "best album in years",[4] while Rick Quinn from PopMatters considered it a mid-career triumph, writing that it "doesn't merely repeat the melancholy of their work in the early aughts.

"[10] AllMusic's Neil Z. Yeung was effusive, commenting, "For a group so deep into their careers, the album sounds surprisingly urgent and revitalized [...] energetic highlights abound.

"[16] In a more reserved review for Pitchfork, Ian Cohen wrote that, "if Asphalt Meadows doesn't amplify the stakes of forty-something romantic misunderstandings the way "A Movie Script Ending" or "Title and Registration" did in college, it at least unlocks the repressed memory of what it was like to be deeply moved by Death Cab for Cutie songs.