Ainsworth earned her first feature-length credit in 2011 for ongoing collaborator Matthew Lessner's The Woods, an escapist satire which premiered at Sundance Film Festival. In the process of completing degrees, Ainsworth quietly began experimenting with chamber pop composition and in 2014—after working under the tutelage of Joan la Barbara, a pioneer of extended vocal techniques—the first installment of her debut album Right from Real was released via Arbutus, the label also home to Grimes, Blue Hawaii, and Majical Cloudz. Issued in its entirety later that year to wide acclaim, the album's lucid dream sequences drew as much from orchestral strings as from synthpop and Bulgarian folk music, with Ainsworth's own voice ranging from an otherworldly soprano to disembodied, digital sample or clutch of cloned utterances heard as a multitracked choir.