Songfacts®:

• This song paints an image of a woman who dons bondage gear as a special treat for her lover, then waits patiently, hoping they will be pleasantly surprised by what they see. It's very sad in a way - she's been scorned by this person ("All of the nights you turned away my touch") but still wants desperately to please them. Even sadder, they don't come home, so she's left posing in bondage.
  
  "I love this really literal image of this woman done up in bondage and waiting for someone to come home for this sexy surprise that never comes," Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast told Stereogum. "For me, there's something there that's a symbol of monogamy, or how bondage can be this very literal type of bondage but also the ways that humans seek bondage in monogamy and the kind of comfort that that can provide. And what you walk away from in your life to have that. I think that's a really beautiful thing."
• The song was first released in 2018 as part of the 4-Track Singles Series, where 12 different artists made songs on the same 4-track analog recorder. Michelle Zauner recorded the song in a day, which as you can imagine, is more stripped back. She revisited the song for Jubilee, the third Japanese Breakfast album, enlisting Jack Tatum from the band Wild Nothing for help with production and instrumentation - he played a variety of instruments on the track. Zauner and Tatum first worked together on "Be Sweet," which ended up being the most popular song on the album. They wrote that song with the intention of pitching it to another artist, but Zauner decided to keep it.
• In addition to songwriting, production, singing and playing various instruments, Michelle Zauner also directs most of the videos for Japanese Breakfast, one of the skills she developed at Bryn Mawr College. She directed the "Posing In Bondage" video, which has nothing to do with the lyrics in a literal sense (no bondage!) but hits on that disconnected, ephemeral mental state evoked in the song. It shows Zauner entering a grocery store on a hoverboard very late at night, where the only other person in the store is the check-out girl. Zauner has blood stains around her mouth as if she just feasted on a wildebeest. She proceeds to drink orange juice and eat noodles.
  
  The store is a Super A Foods in Los Angeles, which let them shoot there after hours. The employee is played by Harmony Tividad from the band Girlpool. Zauner said she chose the location because she felt that "no place felt lonelier than an empty grocery at 1 a.m."