Alomar's rhythm guitar on "Never Let Me Down" and Frampton's sitar on "Zeroes". He sent rough mixes, called "stems", to each musician as a baseline along with ideas of what they should record. Each musician recorded their parts separately, and were not typically in the studio together, although Torn and Gabrels did record together for one day at one point. For "Day-In Day-Out", McNulty discovered that Bowie had recorded the Borneo Horns playing live, but had at some point replaced them with synthesised horns. McNulty restored the live horns in the new version, which has "one foot in the past and another in the present", saying "it was difficult. Most of the lyrics are quite dark, but everything else about it is almost uplifting.... I just thought, 'It makes sense to do something bright.'" For "New York's in Love", Gabrels wanted the new recording to reflect the change in New York, saying "[the city] isn't really about the blues anymore. It's more multicultural...I wanted to reflect that change with what I did [play]...I told Mario, 'Put up that song and let me see what happens.'...I soloed through the whole song and tried different things, and I reacted to what was going on. When the song ended, Mario looked at me and said, 'Well, that one's done then.' [laughs]". McNulty replaced a lot of synthesiser parts throughout the album with strings, saying "There were a lot of random synthesisers from the Labyrinth department lurking in the background. I was pretty confident I could do a lot of that work with strings." Anderson replaced Rourke for the remix of "Shining Star". O'Leary disliked her appearance, finding it "intriguing in theory" but poor in execution. Regarding the song, McNulty stated: "The [original] programming is a mess and the rap comes out of nowhere. I was just trying to find the right elements to fit the song. Luckily I know David and Laurie Anderson were good friends and she said yes to this [recording new vocals for the song] and it was really great of her." Original musicians Alomar and Kızılçay were not part of the reproduction. Alomar approved of the changes, but Kızılçay was unhappy with the new arrangements and threatened a lawsuit as a result. The release of the box set was preceded by the digital release of the single "Zeroes (2018) (Radio Edit)" in July 2018, and a physical 7" single