Having known each other since childhood, Chris Bailey, Kasper Sandstrom, Charlie Howarth and Andrew Harrison started making music as teenagers living in Nottingham. The four experimenting with different names before settling on Do Nothing in 2018. A pair of EPs, 2020’s Zero Dollar Bill and the following year’s Glueland, established Do Nothing among an exciting crop of new British bands huddled loosely under the post-punk banner. Chris Bailey had big ambitions for the first Do Nothing album, though, and even in early interviews was stressing the importance of always evolving. This desire to change, twinned with the time-freezing pandemic that impacted early stages of writing, raised more questions than it elicited answers for the singer and chief songwriter. The resulting feeling was that of a creative stutter; a disconnection between intention and end product.

The debut album Snake Sideways was released in 2023. Ten tracks that interrogate feelings of tying identity to a vocation, self criticism and the precarity of dreams. Sunday Times hailed them "smarter than your average band" and the record described as "a truly impressive debut" by Dork and "a great debut album" by Clash.