The album, recorded between 2020 and 2021, features production from collaborators including Paul Epworth, Clarence Clarity, Stuart Price, and Marcus Andersson.

Sawayama also promoted the album via performances on The Graham Norton Show,[3] Strictly Come Dancing[4] and Late Night with Seth Meyers.

[5] Sawayama has named Kelly Clarkson, the Corrs, Paramore, and Sugababes as artists who influenced Hold the Girl,[6] as well as Taylor Swift's 2020 album Folklore.

[21] Sawayama reflected that the genre "represents comfort, brilliant storytelling and authentic expression of the writer's reality"; she dubbed the song "euphoric and tongue-in-cheek".

[21] The song references gay icons,[12] namely Britney Spears, Whitney Houston and Diana, Princess of Wales, and criticises the paparazzi's "cruelty" towards them.

[23] Writing for Rolling Stone UK, Hannah Ewens stated that the album's title track presents Sawayama singing with 2000s R&B vocals and "opens like a holy gesture to Madonna's 'Like a Prayer' and becomes an emotional dancefloor filler".

[25] The author described "Catch Me in the Air" as a celebration of Sawayama's relationship with her mother, written like a "Corrs song as if pitched to Gwen Stefani".

[28][29] In May 2022, Sawayama began advertising a forthcoming release through social media content and pamphlets with "blood-red" background and the text "Rina is going to hell" in all caps.

"[14] Writing for Pitchfork, Cat Zhang called the album "decidedly more earnest and weighty" than its predecessor and likened it to "an attempt to merge the full-throated spectacle of Born This Way with the surviving-through-trauma emotionality of Chromatica".

Zhang additionally opined that the myriad of "genre mash-ups and key changes" mean that "almost every song strives to be Sawayama's 'Bohemian Rhapsody'" but the album's "constant pivots make it hard to track its central concept: revisiting and empathizing with a younger self".

[51] Hannah Mylrea of NME called the record "the best British pop album of the year", complimenting Sawayama's "laser-precision melodies and hooks", "distinctive lyricism" and "impressive level of intimacy" in spite of the "high-octane" tracklist.