[2] Sleeping in the Aviary's frontman, Elliott Kozel, wrote some of the songs on Expensive Vomit in a Cheap Hotel while in a hospital in Colorado waiting to find out if his mom would die (she didn't).

[2] The album was recorded soon after Kozel's mother's hospitalization, as well as a co-worker's brain aneurysm and a friend's drug overdose.

[3] He has since said that he didn't like Expensive Vomit very much and that he thought there were "four good songs" on it,[2] and the album's style was "a conscious response to Panic!

"[4] An article in Free Press Houston noted that Expensive Vomit's music took "a decidedly more folky and weighty approach" than did Sleeping in the Aviary's previous album, Oh, This Old Thing?.

Club wrote that it "opens up the band’s tender side amid its lo-fi scars and unruly freak-outs,"[13] and Katjusa Cisar described it as "a blistering and catchy mix of punk, folk and rock".