Secret Treaties

Secret Treaties was produced by Murray Krugman and Sandy Pearlman at the Columbia 30th Street Studio in New York, with Tim Geelan and Jerry Smith engineering and cover design by John Berg. Pearlman wrote most of the lyrics, Patti Smith those of "Career of Evil" and Richard Meltzer those of two others. A music-box passage between "Harvester of Eyes" and "Flaming Telepaths" was later identified as Ivanovici's "Waves of the Danube", from an unknown recording. A four-channel quad mix was issued in 1974, and a 2016 Audio Fidelity SACD carries stereo and quad.

It reached number 53 on the Billboard 200 and was certified gold in 1992. AllMusic and Classic Rock gave it four and a half stars, Robert Christgau a B and Martin Popoff ten out of ten. In 1975 readers of Melody Maker voted it the top rock album of all time; Kerrang! ranked it 22nd of the 100 greatest heavy metal albums in 1989, and Rolling Stone placed it 47th among its 50 coolest records in 2002. Albert Bouchard told Defenders of the Faith in 2021 that the band really disliked the mix and sought a professional mixer afterward.