Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!

Mark Mothersbaugh, Gerald Casale and Bob Mothersbaugh wrote the album between 1974 and 1977. Jocko Homo was demoed in 1974 and first played live on 31 October 1975, and by 19 May 1977 the band had played every track from it onstage. Bowie and Iggy Pop heard a demo tape that reached them through the wife of Tin Huey guitarist Michael Aylward, and Pop, Bowie, Eno and Robert Fripp all showed interest in producing. In October 1977 Patrick Gleeson invited the band to record Come Back Jonee and Shrivel-Up at his Different Fur studio in San Francisco. A month later Bowie introduced them at Max's Kansas City and told the audience he planned to produce their first album in Tokyo.

A series of engagements kept Bowie away, and Eno was chosen. The band flew to Germany in February 1978 to work at Conny Plank's studio near Cologne. Because Devo had no label, Eno paid for the flights and studio time, confident they would sign, and asked for a share of later deals. Casale missed his flight, so the first day was spent playing with Eno, Bowie, Holger Czukay of Can and Dieter Moebius of Cluster. Bowie was filming Just a Gigolo but helped Eno at weekends. The Different Fur recordings were overdubbed in Germany.

The sessions frustrated both sides. Eno found the band unwilling to deviate from its demos, and Devo later admitted they had been resistant to his ideas: he made synth parts for almost every song, but they used them on only three or four. After the conflicts, Bowie was brought in to remix the album. Warner Bros. held the North American rights and Virgin the UK rights, and legal disputes between the two pushed the release back from its planned spring date.

The cover was drawn by Joe Heiner from a photograph of the golfer Chi-Chi Rodriguez, combined with a morphed image of four US presidents that Mark Mothersbaugh supplied. Warner Bros. had objected to the golfer image, and Casale said the result was far more Devo than the original. The European sleeve used stills from The Truth About De-Evolution.

In the US the album peaked at number 78. In the UK it entered the chart on 16 September 1978, stayed seven weeks and reached number 12, going silver on 15 January 1979. The US gold award came on 27 July 2001. Robert Christgau gave it a B plus and called the music catchy, comical, herky-jerky rock and roll, adding that it was as good as novelty music ever gets but led nowhere. Rolling Stone's Tom Carson wrote that there was not an ounce of feeling anywhere. Pitchfork placed it at number 89 on its 2004 list of the best albums of the 1970s, Rolling Stone ranked it 252 in its 2020 list of the 500 greatest albums, and Paste placed it 22nd on its list of the best post-punk albums.