The band began working on the album in 2016 and recorded it with Joe Clayton at Nø Studio in Manchester in May 2017, amidst a period of personal turmoil for its members.

Categorized as a metalcore album alongside mathcore, melodic hardcore, post-hardcore, post-metal, and screamo, its songs are thematically based around communication, things left unsaid, and relationships.

"[9] Kim Kelly of Pitchfork found the album both dynamic and unpredictable and viewed its "soft-to-loud, pretty-to-harsh" setups—seen notably on "Gilt" and "Better Abuse"—typical of "melodic metalcore".

[6] The album's title track features progressive metal time signature changes,[2] whilst "Secretspace" and "Gilt" place "shimmering post rock chords atop muscular, syncopated grooves".

[6][9] In a 2022 interview with Metal Express Radio, Azzouz said that The Language of Injury was "written and recorded during a time of immense pain and suffering" for Ithaca's members.

Inspired by the collaborative Cult of Luna and Julie Christmas album Mariner (2016) and Kate Bush, it was the first Ithaca song where Azzouz used clean singing.

[44] The band were in Copenhagen when Denmark enacted lockdown measures against the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing them to cancel the remaining tour dates and return to the United Kingdom.

[3] Similarly, Andrew Sacher of BrooklynVegan considered it "one of the finest 2019 debuts of its kind" for its mix of "nostalgia for the turn of the millennium and a strong embrace of the present".

[7] Bandcamp Daily selected it as their "Album of the Day", with Zoe Camp calling it "a gorgeous, gargantuan record that flips hardcore sentimentalism on its head—not for the sake of novelty, but of necessity.

"[9] Ondarock's Alessandro Mattedi highlighted the album's "technical and explosive riffing" and the performances of Haycock and drummer James Lewis, but found Azzouz "almost intangible" and "muffled" by its poor mixing and production.

[5] Kelly, who viewed Azzouz's vocals to be one of Ithaca's "strongest assets", similarly felt that the production allowed her to get "unintentionally buried under the sound and the fury".

[6] Although he felt that the band had "one or two ideas" and "an enormously varied singer", Julius Lench of Ox-Fanzine found the album "dull" and criticized its overuse of breakdowns.