In It for the Money

Only two songs existed when the band went into Sawmills in 1996, so the rest were written during the sessions. John Cornfield and the band produced most of it, with Sam Williams producing Going Out. Pitchfork's Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote in 2021 that several songs began as group jams, and that the band could not resist studio tricks yet kept their sense of concise craft. Rob Coombes is credited as a writer on all twelve songs. Sometimes I Make You Sad has a guitar solo recorded at half speed, then sped up to sound like a mandolin, and drum sounds made by the band grunting on a loop. Other titles considered were Hold on to the Handrail and Children of the Monkey Basket.

The cover photograph shows the band busking during the filming of the Cheapskate video. The title nods to Frank Zappa's We're Only In It for the Money.

It reached number two in the UK and sold 300,000 copies there and over a million worldwide. Coombes said that outselling I Should Coco abroad meant the band could sleep at night. Singles were Going Out (February 1996), Richard III, Sun Hits the Sky, Cheapskate and Late in the Day. NME called it "more fun than watching a wombat in a washing machine" and ranked it tenth among the year's albums, and Q readers voted it 68th in a 1998 poll of the greatest albums of all time. Erlewine called it "a crash course in the history of UK rock". The Guardian's Malcolm Jack, writing in 2020, called it their second and arguably best album.