Passion Pit frontman Michael Angelakos had expressed a desire in a late 2015 interview to make his music more authentic, and a more accurate reflection of his own life.

[1] During February and March 2017, he uploaded self-released ten songs forming Tremendous Sea of Love to a YouTube channel for The Wishart Group, Angelakos's company that offers legal and healthcare support for musicians.

[2][3][4] The songs have since been taken down, but Angelakos announced that he would give a downloadable copy of the album for free to anyone who retweeted neuroscientist Michael F. Wells' tweet on the importance of science and research.

[5] Angelakos posted a now-deleted reflection on the album to Twitter, part of which stated that "today to edit, to revise, is to propagate a culture […] that is scared of acknowledging the truth and that is saying YOU ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH".

[8] The New Zealand Herald's George Fenwick also praised the album's "startling clarity" and "rawness", further stating that though some elements felt "disparate and scattered", that this may have been intentional on Angelakos's part to challenge established industry norms.