Loveless

Recording began at Blackwing in Southwark in February 1989 and moved through some nineteen studios. Protocol in Holloway became the main base from May 1990, and the final mix was done at The Church in Crouch End. Sixteen engineers are credited, Alan Moulder among them. Shields and Ó Cíosóig produced, with Ó Cíosóig alone producing the short instrumental Touched. Butcher and Googe are credited on guitar and bass, but Shields played those parts, the bass uncredited. Shields wrote most of the songs on acoustic guitar first. The band devised the cover, photographed by Angus Cameron, and its Kabel typeface was later reused on the cover of Lost in Translation.

It reached 24 on the UK albums chart. When You Sleep and Only Shallow were the singles. Q wrote that it "amounts to a virtual reinvention of the guitar", Select called it an album without parallel, and Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune said Shields had written a new vocabulary for the instrument. Spin's Jim Greer dissented. Pitchfork ranked it first of the decade in 1999 and again in 2022, the Irish Times named it the best Irish album in 2008, and Rolling Stone placed it 73rd of the 500 greatest albums in 2020.

The original release used a digital master made in 1991. Shields later said he preferred the sound of the DAT to anything else, though he felt the 1991 master lacked transient detail. He remastered the album himself in 2006 and 2007, a job delayed when the analogue multitracks went missing at Metropolis Studios for a year, and Sony released it in May 2012 as two discs, one from the original tape and one from the half-inch analogue tapes. Spin found one set louder with less hiss and the other closer to the old CD. A fully analogue vinyl remaster followed in 2018, and Domino kept the two-disc form for its 2021 reissue, which reached seven in the UK. Shields disowned a 2003 vinyl pressing made without his permission.