Songs About Fucking

The band had already decided to split before the record was made, prompted by Durango's plan to study law and a wish to stop at what they felt was a creative peak. The album was recorded half in London and half at Albini's home studio, and John Loder engineered the first side only. Albini said in a 1992 Maximumrocknroll interview that side one was the best, because they hopped into the studio, banged the songs out and hopped out, and that the Cheap Trick song got onto the tape and the CD by accident. The cover art came from a Japanese manga. A remixed Model, a Kraftwerk cover, sat among the originals.

Trouser Press called it the band's finest work and its most raging, abrasive, pulverizing record. Robert Christgau, in the Village Voice in April 1988, found Albini's guitar sound undeniable. Pitchfork put it at number 135 on its list of the 200 best albums of the 1980s, where Mehan Jayasuriya wrote that a more accurate title might have been Songs About Cruelty. Treble's Hubert Vigilla called it Albini's crowning achievement under the Big Black name. Decibel noted that the liner notes dedicate it to all the bands who do not write love songs. John Peel named it his fifteenth favourite album when The Guardian asked him for twenty, and Robert Plant said it made him an Albini fan.