The album features no printed lyrics, but it seems likely to connect with Isis's past legacy of concept albums, wherein some of the lyrics (such as "She was his queen" from "Dulcinea") relate to past themes. Turner has confirmed the presence of a concept: "I won't say what the concept is, but I can give you some clues about what inspired it: Hassan-i-Sabbah, the Islamic mystic cult leader, [Miguel de Cervantes'] "Don Quixote", [Mark Z. Danielewski's] "House of Leaves", and [Jorge Luis Borges'] "Labyrinths"." However; from repeated explanation of what inspired "Oceanic" and "Panopticon", his stance changed. "Through explaining the last two albums time and time again, I just started to become weary of the topic, and I started to feel like I was losing my connection to the music and the lyrics simply from having repeated it so many times. And for me, personally, it's really important to maintain that connection as much as possible. I feel there's a lot of emphasis these days placed on explaining everything in such a fashion that there's really nothing left for the listener or reader to explore themselves. It's all spelled out. So it's interesting to leave some of that stuff open-ended so they have to do a little bit of legwork themselves." Drummer Aaron Harris explains this further, saying that the album is based “on personal perception of anything [...] and what's true and what's not true.”