Salem Ilese debuted her dissatisfied, relationship-themed dance-pop on the EP 757 in 2019. A year later, her breakout track, "Mad at Disney," took off on social media on its way to the international pop charts. A singer for as long as she can remember, Los Angeles' Ilese enrolled in her first songwriting class at the age of ten and worked at honing her skills over the next decade, including a stint at the Berklee College of Music. One of her first releases, 2018's "Impatient," got its own remix EP in 2019, and that June, the song also appeared on her debut EP, 757. In July 2020, Ilese issued "Mad at Disney," a song she co-wrote with Bendik Møller and Jason Hahs that was prompted by a pair of Disney live-action versions of animated classics in 2019. With production by Møller and Hahs, the track went viral on social media a month later, and by mid-September "Mad at Disney" was being streamed over a million times a day, eventually reaching the Top 50 in places like Australia, Norway, and Ireland. It peaked at number 82 on the Billboard Canadian Hot 100. She followed up with "Coke & Mentos" and "Marry Christmas" before the end of the year.