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The album took just three weeks to record, and the band claim it cost only $35,000. 'I wish we had just paid for it ourselves instead of owing everything to Warner Brothers', Fred Schneider lamented in 2016.

The B-52's went into the studio after having made their reputation as a live band, and contrary to their expectations – and aspirations, perhaps – producer Chris Blackwell didn't intend to polish those rough, punky edges significantly.

'We were continuously on the road', said Keith Strickland. 'Then we recorded the album and Chris Blackwell wanted to capture us as we were. I remember listening back to the mixes appalled, because I heard this sound so differently! It sounded so bad, so sparse!

'[No] embellishment whatsoever, no overdubs, very little reverb, very little effect, bare minimum. He said, "I just wanted to capture exactly what it is that you do". And at the time I just hated it. Now I get what he was trying to achieve.'

'He's really a genius, the way he produced the first album', Kate Pierson told The Guardian, 'because he wanted us to sound exactly like we do live. And we thought, "Oh, we're really going to sound enhanced. It's going to sound better". [That's because] live, I played all the bass parts and the keyboard parts, so I was doing all that and singing with it. But he said, "Whatever you play onstage is what I want you to play on the record."'

'We heard it, and we were like, "Oh God, it sounds just like us..."', she added. 'But in retrospect, that was really a genius move, because it was such an iconic sound that he didn't want us to mess it up.'