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The Rentals' fourth album was announced alongside the release of the single "Elon Musk Is Making Me Sad" on October 4, 2019.Rentals frontman Matt Sharp tweeted about the album's production at various points throughout 2018,indicating that the album would be engineered by Dave Fridmann, who had previously engineered Weezer's Pinkerton. On December 20 of 2018, Sharp tweeted that the mastering had been finished at Sterling Sound in Nashville, Tennessee. 
In an interview with The Interplanetary Podcast, Sharp explained that he started forming the album by starting with 50 song ideas.Sharp said that his one rule for these new songs was that nothing could be autobiographical, explaining that he had grown bored of writing about his own lived experiences and perspective. Sharp also mentioned that he first became acquainted with guitarist Nick Zinner at a New Years party shortly after Zinner's band the Yeah Yeah Yeahs had performed a live cover of the Rentals song "The Love I'm Searching For" in 2006.Years later,Sharp contacted Zinner again and convinced him to work on the album.Sharp and Zinner worked on the songs independently in their own respective home studios.According to Sharp, engineer Dave Fridmann agreed to work on the album immediately after Sharp pitched the idea of a space-themed album featuring Zinner. 
The album's title was formally unveiled on November 5,2019 alongside the new single "Spaceships",with pre-orders made available via the band's Bandcamp page.The next single,"Forgotten Astronaut", was unveiled on November 20,2019, with each subsequent "single" released every other week with an accompanying limited-run clothing/merchandise item designed by illustrator and print designer Ivan Minsloff.On March 24,2020,the album's physical release and eleventh single were postponed by two weeks due to the 2019 coronavirus (COVID-19). 
During the course of the album's release cycle,the band created challenges for fans in conjunction with the collaborative media platform HitRecord. 
 
Each of the 16 songs on this double album tells its own story — with inspiration coming from real-life occurrences like Apollo 11 (“Forgotten Astronaut”) and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster (“Great Big Blue”), as well as hypothetical, apocalyptic scenarios that fall under “science fiction” but aren’t so impossible to imagine these days — and Matt chose to introduce these stories to the world by releasing one song at a time over the past few months.Together, the 16 songs of Q36 make something that genuinely earns the term “epic.” It’s by far the most ambitious music that Matt Sharp has ever released, and he pulls it off.The Rentals’ first reunion album proved they could still churn out quality versions of the music they made in the ’90s, but I don’t know who could’ve predicted Matt would return six years later with a star-studded line up and an album that is both literally and figuratively out of this world. This is the kind of album that music nerds dream up when they’re shooting the breeze about hypothetical supergroups and album concepts that will never exist.
But I promise you’re not dreaming, Q36 really does exist, and it’s as great as it sounds like it’d be. Surely “Q36” is Matt’s magnum opus.

I was unsure at first as the singles came out but one by one it turned into a masterpiece!