When I Was Born for the 7th Time

Cornershop's third album was recorded over about two months and released by Wiiija on 8 September 1997, with Luaka Bop and Warner Bros. handling it in the United States. Singh produced it with Dan the Automator and Daddy Rappaport. It was recorded in studios in London, San Francisco and Preston. The photographer Greg Neate, who first photographed the band at early Leicester gigs, wrote on the band's site that the record was an unexpected transformation and that it was shaped by Wiiija with international backing from Luaka Bop.

Singh described the sessions as very intense and very relaxed. The music draws on indie rock, Britpop, electronic music and hip-hop. Sleep on the Left Side opens it, with Brimful of Asha second. Anthony Saffery's sitar and Ayres's tamboura sit under Singh's Punjabi vocals on We're in Yr Corner. Good Shit has Lourdes Belart counting in Spanish. Paula Frazer sings on Good to Be on the Road Back Home, Justin Warfield delivers a hip-hop vocal on Candyman over a looped Larry Coryell guitar riff, and the album ends with a Punjabi-language cover of the Beatles' Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown).

It reached number 17 on the UK Albums Chart and was certified Gold, and had sold 198,000 copies in the United States by February 2002. Rolling Stone's Neva Chonin called it a cohesive, finely crafted LP. Christgau gave it an A and described its fusion as subsumed into its own song-based catchiness. Trouser Press said Sleep on the Left Side and Brimful of Asha were among the best one-two leadoffs of the 1990s, and called the album a truer spiritual successor to 3 Feet High and Rising than anything De La Soul has managed. Spin placed it at number one among its Top 20 Albums of the Year for 1997, and it ranked third in the Village Voice Pazz and Jop poll. Q put it at number 68 in its 2000 list of the 100 Greatest British Albums, and it appears in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Pitchfork's Rob Mitchum, in a 2002 review of the follow-up, thought it somewhat overrated while praising Brimful of Asha.