This Mortal Coil is a project of Ivo Watts-Russell, president of the British 4AD record label, begun in 1983. Because it features members of other recording groups, This Mortal Coil (TMC) is an example of a supergroup. The records consist mostly of dark and moody interpretative cover versions of a wide variety of artists ranging from Big Star and Talking Heads to The Apartments and Tim Buckley.

A number of tracks from the first TMC album, It'll End In Tears, feature vocals by Elizabeth Fraser of the Scottish group Cocteau Twins, who also released music on 4AD.

The recording was also used by David Lynch for the film Lost Highway (1997), first as very quiet incidental music and then as an accompaniment to the film's climactic love scene. The track is, however, not included on the soundtrack album for the movie. In 1998 Watts-Russell put together another record very much in the style and format of TMC, and using many of the same musicians, such as John Fryer and Louise Rutkowski. The band's name had become The Hope Blister and the album's title, ...smile's OK.

The group takes its name from Shakespeare. In particular Hamlet's soliloquy To be, or not to be, where it refers to dying; "coil" is used in its archaic sense of "disturbance, trouble":

"What dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause."
Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1, line 67