The Cars' third studio album, Panorama, released in 1980, marked a deliberate departure from the polished New Wave sound that had made the Boston band a critical and commercial success. Rather than repeat the formula of their acclaimed 1978 debut and 1979's Candy-O, the group leaned into a darker, more mechanical style built around drum machines and vocoder effects, a move that divided critics and fans and remains contentious among listeners to this day. The shift came amid a turbulent period for the band, including a management change that sparked a legal dispute with their former manager.

Produced once again by Roy Thomas Baker, Panorama stripped back the catchy hooks of earlier records in favour of aggressive, unconventional tracks such as "Don't Tell Me No" and "Up And Down". The album's lead single, "Touch And Go", is regarded by many as one of the band's finest recordings, yet it only reached number 37 on the US charts, and the record overall received the weakest reviews and sales of the band's career to that point. The Cars subsequently returned to a more commercial, pop-oriented sound on Shake It Up (1981) and Heartbeat City (1984), leaving Panorama as a singular, experimental outlier in their catalogue.