Following the critical acclaim of her 2022 breakout solo debut, Sweet Tooth, and her rock project Deerlady, which was named a Stereogum Band To Watch, the eight-track album was born out of years of listening to repatriated recordings that came back to Obomsawin’s community in 2023. Coincidentally, the ethnological language recordings that were recovered by Odanak from Dartmouth College came just after the release of her debut album. Obomsawin blends these with her own field recordings. Through this process, she reimagines Wabanaki music, language, and philosophy as improvisational frameworks.

Yet the album was also inspired by her own time in the basement of Dartmouth College, where she spent hours as a student staring at José Clemente Orozco’s 24-panel fresco The Epic of American Civilization. Painted in the early 1930s, the panels trace centuries of Euro-American conquest until every figure is reduced to a skeleton in academic robes, handing out diplomas. Like Orozco, Obomsawin plays with this absurdist morbidity, sometimes through a confrontational composition, or a light-handed trickle of softness. Automatic continues to reject a sanitized version of Native art, refusing to translate Indigenous language or sugarcoat struggle. The record celebrates a long line of refusals that came before her, creating a crux for humanizing her ancestors and emphasizing agency in possible futures. “Time works differently when your people have been here for 12,000 years,” Obomsawin says.