Following the departure of Fish, Marillion started to audition singers while writing the new album, and they eventually chose Steve Hogarth.

"The Space" was partly recycled from an unreleased song by Hogarth's old band How We Live titled "Wrapped in the Flag".

(A number of the lyrical concepts from these demos, such as The Voice in the Crowd, would later resurface on Fish's debut studio album, Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors.)

On 28 April 1989 the band went to Outside Studios at Hook End Manor, Stoke Row, Oxfordshire to record the album.

Mark Wilkinson, who had designed all previous Marillion covers, had been asked to provide the artwork but declined, as the band wanted to have a landscape painting, which wasn't his style.

The four square fields dominating the cover symbolise the four classical elements, earth, air, water and fire (clockwise from top left).

At the same time, the cover contained some references to the past: It used the band's original logo, which had been replaced with a "modernised" version on the previous album Clutching at Straws and related releases as well as on B'Sides Themselves (although the 1988 live retrospective The Thieving Magpie also used it).

The feather in the "desert" square is a reference to the image of the "magpie" found on Misplaced Childhood (1985) and Fugazi, the "sky" square contains a fragment of the "Jester's" dress introduced on Script for a Jester's Tear (1983), the chameleon in the "fire" square appears on Script for a Jester's Tear, Fugazi (1984) and Misplaced Childhood; the painting with the clown's face falling into the water upside-down is taken from the Fugazi cover.

The opener, "The King of Sunset Town", in John Helmer's original version, was about poverty; however, Hogarth modified it under the impression of the brutal oppression of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 by the Chinese government; the line "And everyone assembled here / Remembers how it used to be / Before the 27th came" refers to the 27th Army involved in the massacre.

In 1997, as part of a series of Marillion's first eight studio albums, EMI re-released Seasons End with remastered sound and a second disc containing bonus material.