The bulk of "Sulk" was written and recorded in the same sessions for compilation album "Fourth Drawer Down", and the bizarre antics in the studio were a result of the band experimenting with ways of creating new sounds. Rankine said, "We were constantly thinking of what we could do to make this sound different, what can we do with the tools that we've got—which was the musicians. We were the tools. It wasn't just for the sake of being different. But we'd look up lists of instruments and go, 'What the hell is a jangle piano?' The next day this piano would suddenly arrive with all these little metal bits. And that's what we used on 'Party Fears Two', for the intro." He also described their restructuring of the traditional drum kit to create an attention-grabbing sound: "What we did on ["Bap de la Bap"] and quite a lot of the songs on "Sulk" was take away all the tom-toms and make the whole drum kit out of snare drums. So there'd be a seven-inch metal snare drum as the snare and a five-inch copper snare as one of the toms, and then maybe a real deep nine-inch black beauty made out of ebony as another tom-tom. So it made the whole thing really explosive."