record Infections of a Different Kind (Step 1) in January 2018. The production included new producers Askjell Solstrand and Roy Kerr and Tim Bran from MyRiot, with Aurora herself also involved in this aspect. Her stay in France during the EP's recording was filmed for Aurora's documentary Once Aurora. The EP was mixed and mastered in Bergen, with Aurora announcing through an Instagram story on 3 April 2018 that it was finished. Aurora initially stated to Idolator in April 2018 that Infections of a Different Kind (Step 1) was originally a full-length album with 11 tracks. Nevertheless, she later revealed two months later that the album was split in two parts, the first part being Infections of a Different Kind (Step 1) on EP format. Aurora chose to divide the record to give listeners more time to every track, since she felt the original project would be "heavy and time-consuming." She acknowledged during a 2019 interview with Clash that the concept of the album "was two different aspects of one process"; she decided to use scrapped tracks from the EP for her following album. Scrapped tracks According to Aurora, forty songs were written for the album and she chose the ones she considered to be the "best". She revealed that some of the songs "will remain unreleased for quite some time, but also a few of them will be on the album." The tracks "Animal" and "The Seed" were originally written for the album but were later included in her second album A Different Kind of Human (Step 2), following the split of the record. Both songs were performed live alongside tracks from Infections of a Different Kind (Step 1). In a September 2017 interview, Aurora was unsure to add "festival songs" like "Feeling", "Soft Universe" and "In Bottles" to the EP; "Soft Universe" was released as the EP's seventh track, while "In Bottles" made it onto A Different Kind of Human (Step 1). Aside of the tracks performed live, snippets of some songs appeared in Once Aurora, with only two song titles ("Spotlight" and "Witches") appearing in the closing credits. Music and lyrics Infections of a Different Kind (Step 1) has been described as a pop, electropop and art pop record with elements of synth-pop, chamber pop, folk, experimental pop, and futurepop. Aurora described her musical direction as "still so fun" because of her involvement in the production, stating