Guerrilla

Rhys wanted Guerrilla to be a commercial-sounding pop album, a jukebox sort of record where every song is different. The band had meant to work again with Gorwel Owen, but Owen felt burned out after producing other bands for a year and a half and asked them to wait. They were too keen to record, so they produced it themselves, at Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios in Wiltshire in mid-1998. They chose Real World because it was close to their homes in Wales. Rhys said the sessions were less volatile than usual, because with no producer the five of them had to reach agreement on everything.

They used a sampler for the first time. About 25 tracks were recorded, and the band kept the upbeat ones to make a record of around 45 minutes. They sequenced it like a hip hop record, with Check It Out as an intro and A Specific Ocean and The Sound of Life Today as interludes. The Sound of Life Today is a 22-second sample of Some Things Come From Nothing played backwards, an accident that happened when the mixing engineer Chris Shaw rewound the mix without muting the tape machine. The title puns on the band's name. Fowler built a three-dimensional model of a yellow creature for the cover. The CD also hides Citizen's Band in the pregap and a reprise of Chewing Chewing Gum after the last song.

Guerrilla reached number 10 on the UK Albums Chart. NME called it an acid fried quadrophonic vision of rock 'n' roll and ranked it third among 1999's albums, and Melody Maker also placed it third. NME later put it at 311 in its list of the 500 greatest albums. Pitchfork's Marc Hogan said it took the band's long-standing whimsicality to its logic-warping extreme and called it an alternate universe to get lost in. Rhys described its lyrics as self-consciously disposable and happy.