Recorded primarily at RAK Studios in London over a two-week period in December 2019 with producer John Congleton, it was released on 11 September 2020 on Infinity Industries, the band's own imprint.

Freek Stoltenborgh described the album's themes as dealing with "wonderment at the wider world despite the horror of its politics; existentialism and the prolonged, if fading, youthfulness of being in a touring band, and the ominous threat of climate change.

[5] In the build up to the announcement of Re-Animator, the band released a self-made video for single "In Birdsong", featuring a number of scenes created by Jonathan Higgs in open-source modelling software.

[7] Higgs told NME that "In Birdsong" was not intended as the lead single for the album, though the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic meant that the track "unexpectedly emerged as the most appropriate song to reappear with", admitting that the band's original choice, "Big Climb", would have been considered in poor taste.

It's thrilling to hear Higgs apply his odd-but-visceral writing style to a love song: "You can barely make a silhouette out/And you open your ventriloquist mouth/And the words are wrong but in the right order."

The bicameral-mind concept pops up in several songs, most notably in "The Actor," where Higgs' narrator comes to terms with the other voice in their head ("if we look the same/then I don't mind").