Bad Moon Rising

By mid-1984 the band was playing in New York almost weekly, and Moore later said it had reached the point of overkill. They went to the rehearsal room, retuned their guitars and changed their equipment so they could not play the old songs, then wrote new ones. Recording began in September 1984 at Martin Bisi's BC Studio in Brooklyn, which the band credited as Before Christ Studio.

The record is loosely about the dark side of America, with references to Charles Manson and to early settlers meeting Native Americans. Transitional pieces that Moore and Ranaldo played onstage during tuning breaks became the segues between songs, so there are almost no gaps. Death Valley '69, the closer, came from a collaboration between Moore and Lydia Lunch, who sings lead.

The cover is James Welling's photograph of a scarecrow with a flaming jack-o'-lantern for a head. The New York press largely ignored the album, but it was acclaimed in the UK, where it sold 5,000 copies. Robert Palmer of the New York Times ranked it fourth among the year's ten best albums, and Alternative Press placed it at number 42 on its list of the greatest albums of 1985 to 1995, ahead of Daydream Nation.