On June 5, 2018, Grimes teased the song on her Twitter account, describing the song as an “ethereal chav jam”.

The song was performed at The Game Awards 2019 on December 12th, 2019 during the segment dedicated to the soundtrack of the upcoming video game Cyberpunk 2077.

❝ I got really obsessed with this Bollywood movie called Bajirao Mastani—it’s about forbidden love. I was like, ‘Man, I feel like the sci-fi version of this movie would just be incredible.’ So I was just sort of making fan art, and I then I really wanted to get kind of crazy and futuristic-sounding. It’s actually the first song I made on the record—I was kind of blocked and not sure of the sonic direction, and then when I made this I was like, ‘Oh, wow, this doesn’t sound like anything—this will be a cool thing to pursue.’ It gave me a bunch of ideas of how I could make things sound super future. That was how it started. ❞

4ÆM was the first song made for Miss Anthropocene.