Featuring assistance from 6LACK and Sabrina Claudio. From Complex:
“The sound of the album took a while to lock-in. I wanted it to feel like a shoebox you kept under your bed full of Polaroids—just very nostalgic… I was born in 1991 so a lot of the synths have that early-’90s, even late-’80s, feel to it. I wanted to also pull from mid-2000s and early-2000s R&B sensibilities. I grew up listening to a lot of that stuff on the radio and I felt like—to keep with the nostalgic vibe—it made sense to pull from those influences as much as I could.”
“I called the album Sweet Insomnia because, lyrically, every song on the album is bittersweet. You know, nothing is 100 percent positive and lighthearted. Nothing is 100 percent brooding and cynical. It’s very balanced and real, like an unretouched photo. The ‘insomnia’ comes from the fact that I was working on the album from 1 p.m. to 6-7 p.m., then I’d come home to try to get the vocals right from 8 p.m. to 4 in the morning … I got locked in that cycle to the point where, sonically, the album started feeling a little bit hazier.”