Although Kuggur is a new musical entity, its sole member Guðmundur Óli Pálmason is no newcomer to music, being currently active in Icelandic post-doom/black metal band Katla as well as having been a founding member and drummer for twenty years in Sólstafir and having contributed to Potentiam, who now holds a cult status within the international black metal scene.
 

Kuggur's music is of a new ilk though, being mostly electronic and ambient in nature, Guðmundur uses Kuggur to explore previously unvisited musical landscapes without any pre-set limitations. 

Guðmundur started his solo project in 2020 and has said he did not have any high hopes or dreams for it at the beginning and that was just a way for him to experiment with music without any preconceived boundaries and without the confines of a band. He chose to simply use the same name he uses for his visual art, Kuggur ( www.kuggur.com ) as he sees both as an extension of his own persona. Guðmundur ties the two together, using his own visual art for both Katla and Kuggur, he proclaims it all stems from the same pot of inspiration.
 

When Belfry Records offered to release Kuggur's album حصاد َض ْوءٌ النُّ ُجوم (the title translates to Harvesting the Light of the Stars) as a CD, Guðmundur began to see potentials with the project becoming something that might very well reach a bigger audience than he had initially hoped for.
 

After a chance meeting with publisher/record label boss John Cloud, Kuggur signed with his Swedish label Bark at Your Owner.

At that time, Guðmundur had already written and recorded a new album which was initially supposed to be instrumental but he felt maybe the music could benefit from having vocals. Label boss John helped Guðmundur reach out to vocalists in Sweden and Finland while Guðmundur decided to get in touch with a traditional Lebanese Mawal singer that had sung at his wedding party which his mother-in-law had organized for him and his wife in Lebanon (Guðmundur's wife is Lebanese). Guðmundur's wife also put him in contact with another Lebanese singer she knows. According to Guðmundur, that's how he ended up with an album full of singers he really didn't know before, with each and every one of them bringing something unique to the songs.

Outlived, therefore, became a cooperation between Guðmundur (as kuggur), the multiple singers, John, Guðmundur's wife (who also translated some of Guðmundur's lyrics to Arabic and did all the calligraphy), and mixing/mastering engineer Henry Barboza, who made sure everything sounds like an album, rather than just a collection of different songs with different singers.