Screamadelica

Screamadelica was written and demoed in a cramped flat on a Hackney council estate, where an Akai S1000 sampler and keyboards freed the band from verse and chorus songwriting. Its producers were Andrew Weatherall, Hugo Nicolson, The Orb, Hypnotone and Jimmy Miller. Weatherall had never produced in a studio before. Terry Farley was also brought in. It came out on Creation in the UK, on Sire and Warner Bros. in the US and on Columbia in Japan.

The album reached number 8 in the UK and number 2 on the UK independent chart. It has been certified double platinum by the BPI, and Wikipedia reports more than three million sales worldwide. The first pressing of 60,000 copies sold out within days. It won the first Mercury Music Prize in 1992, topped Select's list of the best albums of the 1990s and was named the best Scottish album by The Scotsman in 2003. Q placed it eighteenth among the 100 greatest British albums in 2000, and Rolling Stone ranked it 437th on its 2020 list of 500 albums. AllMusic gave it five stars.

Gillespie said in 2020 that the band had a small studio in Hackney near the Creation offices by autumn 1990 and gave Weatherall tracks and tracks of melodies, which he arranged into abstract pop songs. He credited Hugo Nicolson with the studio skills that realised Weatherall's ideas. Innes told The Guardian it was people let loose with their ideas.

Tom Ewing, reviewing the reissue for Pitchfork in 2016, wrote that the album's mood comes from the meeting of unashamed celebratory club music and rock star fandom. He noted that the album version of Come Together drops Gillespie's vocals and rebuilds the track around the gospel backing singers, and called Higher Than the Sun a post-rave take on Tim Buckley's Starsailor. The album was reissued for its twentieth anniversary with the Dixie-Narco EP, a remix disc and a live album recorded at the Hollywood Palladium, and again in 2021 for its thirtieth, with Demodelica.