The album is styled with a hidden narrative, being the surviving soundtrack to a
banned movie within the universe of the band's dystopian three‑act rock opera tragedy, which is influenced by "
Reagan-era media" like
Phil Collins's "
In the Air Tonight", one of the cover album's tracks. As
We Own This Town explains, the album's song choices "fit within the mythology of the band." The band has described this
framing as intentionally fragmentary, designed to evoke the sensation of reconstructing a lost film from incomplete materials. In the album's opening track, "Pick Up", a woman answers a silent phone call. In "Hunted", the woman, revealed to be a news reporter, commiserates with a man she is on the run with that 'he' will find them. The man agrees and, when asked about his partner, described as 'the one they killed', he says she was a fighter. In "Results", a phone call is depicted in which another man asks if something was secured, before declaring that he wants results, not excuses. The call ends and something crashes as the man grunts in anger. In "Last Stop", various radio broadcasts overlap including the naming of a prime suspect in a murder. Rain and distant police sirens are heard. The man on the run declares that no matter what happens, the way they used to be together was real and cannot be taken away. In the album's final track, "Silent Running (On Dangerous Ground)", fades to a news report discussing the legacy of a long-gone man. According to the design firm for the 2012 single release, the Roy Orbison cover "I Drove All Night" was chosen "because of how directly it tied in with and expanded upon the band's long-running, conceptual narrative" and the artwork was designed to expand on that story. The cassette only release was described as "the final gesture" A note on the interior of the album says that the full theatrical release of
The Cover Up was halted by cast and crew going missing after the initial limited release and that the soundtrack is the only part that survived, declaring "this soundtrack may be the only remaining glimpse of a work of fiction that tread so close to the truth that its creators must have ultimately paid a terrible price." The album's cover art depicts a human hand
shushing a damaged humanoid robot with its mouth removed. The back depicts a similar image with a crying human woman being shushed by a robot hand. The interior artwork depicts a shattered
bust. The album contains an example of lyrical substitution. In the cover of Iron Maiden's "The Trooper" the lyric "the mighty roar of the Russian guns" is replaced with "the mighty roar of the robot guns." == Release ==