The Beta Band

The debut album was produced by the band and Chris Allison, who also engineered it. Regal released it in the UK on 21 June 1999, and Astralwerks in the US on 29 June. The band had planned a double album with each side recorded on a different continent, but their manager Miles Leonard dismissed the idea as impossible. Instead it was recorded partly in a hut belonging to Maclean's grandfather, and at Sawmills Studio, Rockfield Studios and Jacobs Studio. It reached 18 in the UK.

Two long ambient pieces, Happiness and Colour and The Hut, were meant as a bonus disc and went out on promotional copies before the band dropped them. They were released officially with the 2018 remaster. Round the Bend and another album track were issued as a US promotional cassette single, and The Hard One was partly inspired by Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart, whose piano motif the band sampled.

Pitchfork's Stuart Berman wrote that its over-arching oddness retains its own peculiar allure, and Jess Harvell wrote that no band in the past year had the nerve to release a debut as overgrown with ideas. Pitchfork's founder Ryan Schreiber called it the greatest acid-burnt full-length of the late 90s. Rolling Stone's Jonathan Perry in 1999 described the opening track, The Beta Band Rap, as a funny sketchbook chronology of the band's rapid rise.