Goddard said that although the album came together easily, the band had difficulty creating "Hand Me Down Your Love" because "it was just a matter of months and months of adding synthesizers, [and] adding drum parts", which resulted in "something like 160 tracks or pieces of music". As well as this, the band needed to edit out sections that they felt were unnecessary. Goddard discussed the element of time and stated that because the band had more time to create the album, they "tried things out differently" which was ultimately "a little bit unhelpful" due to the number of recorded parts that were never used. Goddard said the band wanted to move away from synths and minimised their presence by making them more subtle. Although the band wanted the album to be a pop record and present "a unified front", Al Doyle stated that the band did not want to lose the "experimental element that [they] had before". To achieve this the band used a broader range of instruments, including a flugelhorn and steelpans in combination with synths and drum machines, as well as a guitar, a drum kit and a piano. Doyle said it was "quite exciting for [the band] to work with that palette of instruments". Whilst the band wanted to create an album that was more cohesive, Taylor said that they did not "try to make it all sound like [the songs are] from the same record". The cohesiveness and unity of the album was a by-product of the way the band spent their time crafting it:
