Behaviour

The duo were dissatisfied with the digital synthesizers and samples then available and wanted to use analogue instruments, so they chose Harold Faltermeyer, an expert on analogue equipment, and recorded with him at his Red Deer studio in Munich. Work began in April 1990 and took ten weeks, with a break in the middle. Further work was done at Sarm West in London, and the orchestra and strings were recorded at Abbey Road. Johnny Marr, with whom Tennant had worked on the Electronic song Getting Away with It in 1989, played guitar on This Must Be the Place I Waited Years to Leave and My October Symphony, a song about the decline of the Soviet Union. Angelo Badalamenti arranged and conducted the orchestra on two songs, and the Balanescu Quartet played strings on My October Symphony.

The album was not meant to mark a change of mood, but it is noticeably subdued. The duo described it later as more reflective and more musical-sounding, and Lowe said Depeche Mode's Violator, released earlier that year, had raised the stakes. Lowe also recalled in 1993 that it was written at the height of the rave scene, when they set out to write something uplifting and ended up with the opposite. Tennant added that there was an element of sadness, and that sad songs are more interesting to write. Barry Walters of Pitchfork, reviewing it in 2017, heard an elegy for what had gone before, written when Tennant's longtime best friend had recently died of AIDS, and singled out Being Boring and Jealousy.

The singles were So Hard, Being Boring, How Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously?, a medley of U2's Where the Streets Have No Name with Can't Take My Eyes Off You, and Jealousy. A Japanese special edition added a bonus mini disc, and the 2001 reissue came with a second disc of B-sides including Miserablism, a satire of Morrissey that was meant for the album until the day it was sent for mastering. Behaviour reached number two in Britain and number 45 in the United States.

It was well reviewed. Jim Farber of Entertainment Weekly called it the best tunes yet, Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune wrote that its subtle brilliance emerges with repeated plays, and Mark Cooper of Q thought its best ballads as wry and touching as vintage Broadway. NME's Roger Morton and the Los Angeles Times' Robert Hilburn were more mixed. Robert Christgau gave it a two-star honorable mention. Q listed it among the 90 best albums of the 1990s, and Ned Raggett ranked it ninth on his list of the top albums of the nineties for Freaky Trigger. In the United States the title is spelled Behavior.