Come On Pilgrim

The mini-album holds eight tracks from the 17-song session at Fort Apache Studios in March 1987. Ivo Watts-Russell chose the eight, remixed them rather than have the band re-record, and left out Here Comes Your Man because it felt too obviously commercial. The title comes from a Larry Norman song, Watch What You're Doing, whose line about a pilgrim the band quote in Levitate Me. Francis said of Norman that when he was 14 he dressed like him and he was his idol. The cover is by Vaughan Oliver, with a photograph by Simon Larbalestier of a friend of his in a hair shirt.

Two songs, Vamos and Isla de Encanta, are partly in Spanish and draw on Francis' time in Puerto Rico. Caribou is about reincarnation, and Ed Is Dead is about a brain-damaged girl who rode a bicycle with a transistor radio strapped to the handlebars. The album entered the UK indie chart on 24 October 1987, stayed 29 weeks and peaked at number 5. It was first issued in the US in August 1988, alongside Surfer Rosa. Francis said in 2022 that he had listened to R.E.M.'s Murmur a lot just before making it. Pitchfork's 2014 essay called it more of a hint at what the band could do than anything else.