[3][4] Luc Lemay joined Negativa with Steeve Hurdle after Gorguts disbanded in 2005, but felt uncomfortable with the improvisational elements in that band's music.

[7] Lemay pursued drummer John Longstreth after being impressed with his performance on Dim Mak's album Knives of Ice.

When we work on arrangements together, we can go into very micro-detail, like in doing composition on a sheet of paper, and we can understand each other's minds and very specific ideas in words by using an academic vocabulary.

Colin's a big fan of those very modern American composers, like Elliott Carter, which is super complex music, and he listens to that like every day.

[5] Inspired by Opeth and the album The Incident by Porcupine Tree, Lemay intended to write more progressive songs with longer running times and more dynamics.

[12] Lemay explained that, while he initially considered writing an album entirely based upon the sand mandala, he later expanded to focus upon Tibetan culture, geography, and history.

[13] Lemay referred to Tibet as "the canvas for the music"[13] in which the first four songs discuss "the splendours of the country, the culture, the topography, the geography",[13] and the last four refer to "the country being invaded, people protesting through immolation, people getting killed trying to escape";[13] the song "Absconders" is based on Jonathan Green's book Murder in the High Himalaya about the Nangpa La shooting incident, and quotes the book with Green's permission.

[2] He further explained how "The Battle of Chamdo" served as the watershed of Colored Sands: The orchestral piece is very important on the record because it divides the concept in two because the first four songs are about the beauty of the philosophy and the landscape and the beauty of those people's culture and everything which is very positive and then you get the orchestral piece which illustrates the Chinese invasion of 1950...So that's why the opening rhythm is a very military, very war-like rhythm, you know?

If you wish love and peace to your enemies and then the other way they put you in prison and torture you and they're in the way of [continued survival] at some point...The Tibetan culture is, in the long run...I would doubt they’re gonna last for another hundred years.

They've been pacific people for centuries; owning an army did not seem to be a priority in their values since they're not interested in the concepts of jealousy, domination, [or] megalomania".

[citation needed] Prior to the album's release, the songs "Forgotten Arrows"[17] and "An Ocean of Wisdom"[18] were made available for online streaming.

[19] Decibel Magazine's Chris Dick proclaimed Colored Sands a leap beyond "mere tech-death metal" that is "new, fresh and expectedly challenging".

[24] Sputnikmusic's Sobhi Youssef viewed the album as a continuation of the experimentation heard on From Wisdom to Hate, noting that Colored Sands "brings even more ideas to the table" without departing from the band's "trademark dissonance-come-insanity", which "is fused in the very fabric of each section, lending a dose of controlled chaos to the near classical designs and atmospheric build-up of Colored Sands".

[1] Denise Falzon, writing for Exclaim!, awarded the album a perfect score and praised the "impeccable" musicianship directed towards elaborating "the more progressive and experimental side of the group".

[21] Sammy O'Hagar of MetalSucks also praised Gorguts for maintaining its distinctive core while presenting an album that sounds "very different" from the rest of its discography.