Very

Very was a reaction to Behaviour, which had been well received by critics but sold less than the earlier records. Being Boring, a song the duo thought among their strongest, had been their least successful single up to then. Lowe's remark, recorded by Chris Heath in his book about the 1991 American tour, was that they should write another good dance album and write Behaviour off as a tax loss. After a break in 1992 they made an uplifting dance-pop album, working on songs at Lowe's home studio and finishing them at Sarm West. They produced it themselves, with Stephen Hague mixing and adding production and Mike Spike Drake also mixing. Anne Dudley arranged and conducted orchestra on three songs, recorded at Angel Studios, and the choir on Go West was recorded at The Power Station in New York.

Tennant explained the title in 1993: it is very Pet Shop Boys, very up, very hi-energy, very romantic, very sad, very pop and very danceable. Tony Wadsworth of EMI recalled that when the label first heard the songs the smiles lit up the room, because it was so obviously commercial yet still very high quality. The new look was an artificial, cartoonish world designed by David Fielding, in reaction to the grunge movement, with computer-generated videos by Howard Greenhalgh for Can You Forgive Her?, Go West, I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing, Liberation and Yesterday, When I Was Mad. Tennant described Can You Forgive Her? as a short story about a man who has been made a fool of by his girlfriend and who, in the third verse, remembers his first sexual experience at school and cannot face the fact that he is gay.

The original release came in an orange jewel case with raised bumps, designed by Daniel Weil of Pentagram and sometimes called the Lego case. It was shown in a 1995 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design. A limited edition, Very Relentless, added a second disc, Relentless, of six experimental and largely instrumental tracks recorded at the same time. Hidden after two minutes of silence at the end of Go West is a short track, Postscript, with Lowe on vocals.

Very reached number one in Britain shortly after release, and every single from it entered the top 20. In the United States it debuted at number 20. David Quantick of NME called it brilliant from start to finish, Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune thought its gay worldview unfolding made it a classic, and Robert Christgau gave it an A. Dennis Hunt of the Los Angeles Times thought their creativity had petered out. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic later called it one of their very best records, and Q ranked it number 91 on its 2000 list of the 100 greatest British albums.