It was released on October 14, 2014, under the band's own Paracadute record label and was produced by Dave Fridmann and Tony Hoffer.

The album was recorded over three years at Dave Fridmann's Tarbox Road Studios in Cassadaga, New York.

The album received generally favorable reviews from music critics and charted at number 74 in the Billboard 200.

The band has released five official singles from the album with accompanying music videos: "The Writing's on the Wall", "I Won't Let You Down", "Upside Down & Inside Out", "The One Moment", and "Obsession".

You'd work on whatever song you wanted for a while, and then you'd get tired or run out of ideas, and then you'd go listen to somebody else's room for a while and make comments on what they were doing.

We did a lot of programming, and that made it easy to transfer files; no matter what you did in a Thor synthesizer, you could take it to somebody else's Reason station and it sounds the same.

"[3] Frontman Damian Kulash also used an OP-1 synthesizer manufactured by Teenage Engineering in recording the album.

[5] OK Go frontman Damian Kulash called Hungry Ghosts "pretty stylistically diverse," like their previous three studio albums, yet more electronic, "but not in an EDM kind of way."

He said some parts of the album are "very modern", with some tracks "made almost entirely of glitchy electronic sounds", while others are influenced by 1980s acts including Prince, INXS and New Order.

As of October 2014, the record holds an aggregated 74 of out 100 on Metacritic based on 6 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

"[19] A writer for the Alternative Press awarded it a similar rating, describing the material as "far more immediate" than their previous studio effort.

[20] Scoring it a 7.8 out of ten, Hilary Saunders of Paste opined it "may not be the musical evolution that fans sought after four years, but OK Go's bold pursuits of creativity in all media remain exciting still.