[1] Manchester Orchestra released their fifth studio album, A Black Mile to the Surface, on July 21, 2017 via Loma Vista Recordings and Favorite Gentlemen.

Manchester Orchestra frontman Andy Hull spent the better part of the year releasing demo albums from his side project, Right Away, Great Captain!, as well as collaborating with Foxing and Touché Amoré.

[16] The album title derives from "Gold Leaves", an early poem by G. K. Chesterton that details the narrator's shifting relationship with God as he ages.

As part of the album announcement, the first single and music video from The Million Masks of God, "Bed Head", were released the same day.

The track was accompanied by a single-shot video, directed by Isaac Deitz, and describes "the ebb and flow of life long commitment to another person".

Multiple reviewers compared The Million Masks of God to Manchester Orchestra's previous release, A Black Mile to the Surface.

said that Million Masks demonstrated how Black Mile was "not an ambitious, outlying experiment, but the new template for Manchester Orchestra records going forward".

[16] Writing for The Line of Best Fit, Dave Beech agreed that Million Masks felt "much the same" as Black Mile, both in sound and storytelling, and that it "successfully expand[s] further still on the huge ambition and the cinematic scope introduced by its predecessor".

[14] Colin Dempsey of Spectrum Culture, meanwhile, declared that Hull was "finally mature enough to appreciate the power of restraint", following the "youthful overspilling" of Mean Everything to Nothing and the "grandiosity" of Simple Math (2011).

[26] Matt Collar of AllMusic described the album as an "epic dramatic arc", and "a cinematic experience exploring themes of birth, death, and what lies beyond".

[24] Writing for NME, Will Richards highlighted the sonic cohesion of the album, saying that the record "traverses every corner of [Manchester Orchestra]'s sound, from beefy rock songs to string-assisted grandeur and acoustic bliss, further cementing their place as an under appreciated band to treasure".