Yanqui U.X.O.

Steve Albini recorded the album at Electrical Audio in Chicago in late 2001. The band mixed it with Howard Bilerman at Hotel2Tango, and John Loder and Steve Rooke mastered it at Abbey Road in London. It was the first release after the band moved the exclamation mark from the end of the name to after "You". It has none of the field recordings and none of the named movements of earlier albums, and the band described it as "just raw, angry, dissonant, epic instrumental rock". Rob Mazurek, Matana Roberts, Geof Bradfield and Joshua Abrams played trumpet, clarinet, bass clarinet and double bass on "Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls". Shortly after release the band announced an indefinite hiatus, and it was their last album until 2012.

"Yanqui" is Spanish for Yankee, and the liner notes use it for a "multinational corporate oligarchy". "U.X.O." stands for unexploded ordnance. The packaging has an arrow diagram purporting to represent links between four major record labels (AOL Time-Warner, BMG, Sony and Vivendi Universal) and various arms manufacturers, accompanied by a photograph of falling bombs. The band later conceded that showing EMI as a Time-Warner subsidiary was wrong. The liner notes describe "09-15-00" as "Ariel Sharon surrounded by 1,000 Israeli soldiers marching on al-Haram Ash-Sharif & provoking another Intifada". On the double LP "09-15-00" is a single part, a hidden track of a cut-up George W. Bush speech follows some silence, and the second part of "Motherfucker=Redeemer" is about five minutes longer. Setlists had used the working titles "12-28-99", "Tazer Floyd" and "Tiny Silver Hammers" for the three main pieces.

Metacritic gives it 80. AllMusic's Thom Jurek counted it among the band's finest albums, but Ryan Schreiber of Pitchfork said the band had dropped the vocal snippets of earlier records and that the album was "consumed by a painfully glacial pace". Playlouder ranked it 47th among 2002's albums.