This Addiction is the seventh studio album by the punk rock band Alkaline Trio, released February 23, 2010 as the first release by their newly formed record label Heart & Skull, a joint venture with Epitaph Records. Described as a return to the band's punk rock roots, it was recorded at Atlas Studios in their hometown of Chicago with Matt Allison, the same location and producer used for much of their early material. The album draws lyrical inspiration from the band members' personal lives, addressing themes such as love, addiction, death, divorce, grief, suicide, politics, and war. It became the highest-charting album of the band's career, debuting on the Billboard 200 at #11 and also reaching #1 on the Rock, Independent, and Alternative Albums charts.

Following the touring cycle for their 2008 album Agony & Irony, Alkaline Trio left Epic Records due to personnel changes within the record label. Singer and guitarist Matt Skiba explained in a May 2009 interview with Billboard that "Everyone who signed us to Epic, all of the people we trusted there, were let go. And that's not to say the people running it now aren't cool, we just don't know them and we don't like to work generally with people we don't know. We had a bunch of material and wanted to do a record sooner [rather] than later, so we called them and asked them if we could leave and they said, 'Yeah, that’s cool.'" Rather than signing a recording contract with another label, the band decided to release their next album themselves, a move Skiba explained as partially inspired by the independent releases of Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts I–IV and The Slip and Radiohead's In Rainbows:

With the way that everything is being done, with people like Trent Reznor and Radiohead, it was very inspiring to us that when you're doing things on your own you can do whatever you want. Not that we're going to give records away but this time we're starting a label, we want to build it up first and have the freedom to release exclusive things whenever we want. That's something we've always been able to do until we were on Epic, so it's nice that we're able to do that again.

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