New Traditionalists

With Whip It still selling in early 1981, Warner Bros. pressed the band to write another one. Devo declined and made a darker album instead. Casale said they would not keep painting the same painting over and over. It was their first self-produced album, with the emphasis on synthesizers and drum machines, including Roland sequencers, an SH-101 and a CR-78. The tape began to break down during the vocal sessions, so the work was moved to digital reel-to-reel and finished at the Record Plant in Los Angeles.

Through Being Cool opens the record, and the music historian Andy Zax saw in it a band more than slightly ambivalent about its newfound popularity. The title came from pins reading New Traditionalists that the band bought after meeting two businessmen wearing them in a Japanese sushi bar. The band wore rubber pompadours modelled on John F. Kennedy's hair. The album reached number 23 in the US and was the last Devo album to chart in the UK. Casale later called it the last record with some balance between primal energy and electronics. Christgau wrote that the videos for its three major songs made their intent more explicit.