Cellular Songs is the first Meredith Monk release with ECM since the extensive box-set Meredith Monk: The Recordings in 2022 and the first recording of new music since 2016's On Behalf of Nature. It is also the second part of an interdisciplinary trilogy of performance works by Meredith Monk that began with On Behalf of Nature, a meditation on the precarious state of our global ecology. Cellular Songs turns attention to the very fabric of life itself, and evokes such biological processes as layering, replication, division and mutation. Monk drew inspiration, she has noted, from reading The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by physician and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee, struck by the notion that "a cell is like a miraculous prototype of cooperation, offering an alternative culture or template of human behavior to one of competition and destruction."

Cellular Songs features the women of the acclaimed Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble (Monk, Ellen Fisher, Katie Geissinger, Joanna Lynn-Jacobs and Allison Sniffin), and some of Monk's most adventurous and daring writing for voice. The work, at once playful and contemplative, conjures cycles of birth and death throughout. "Some of the pieces have much more dissonance and chromatic harmonies, and the forms are almost like three-dimensional sculptures," Monk notes. "Earlier, my music had much more to do with layering. Now you can almost see or hear the piece rotating as if it were a sculpture in space, though it's a musical form."

With voices and body percussion among the primary resources, Monk underlines her aim to "boil down what I am doing to its essence". Songs are wordless, with the exception of "Happy Woman", which also incorporates piano, violin and vibraphone by Allison Sniffin and John Hollenbeck. Cellular Songs was premiered at the BAM Harvey Theater, Brooklyn, New York in March 2018. The Financial Times hailed the work as a "deeply affecting meditation on the nature of the biological cell as a metaphor for human society" and "an antidote to the troubled times we live in."

In the album's liner notes, writer Bonnie Marranca takes up this theme: "Art takes many forms to address global crises as a way of comprehending reality. Monk's work has chosen a path different than the response that is a direct statement of conditions, following instead her Buddhist grounding in art as spiritual practice… Her work honors the human need for the feelings of love and joy and beauty. In the integrity of its regard, Cellular Songs is of this world but also beyond this world, like all poetic works of the imagination."