It received widespread critical praise after its release;[1] record producer and musician Steve Albini called it "the most impressive debut record from a rock band I've heard all year.

Bassist Drew Miller also performs lead vocal on a few songs, including "Byker Hill", but after this album would stay strictly an instrumentalist.

The song "The Man Who Was Boiled in Lead" is a version of Scottish writer John Leyden’s ballad "Lord Soulis",[7] based on the death of Scottish lord William II de Soules, who was, according to legend, killed by his tenants at Ninestane Rig in 1320 by being boiled alive while wrapped in a sheet of lead, to defeat his mastery of black magic.

[8][9][10] (Despite the title, Boiled in Lead did not take its band name from this song but the Irish murder ballad "The Twa Sisters" as performed by folk group Clannad on their album Dúlamán, as well as the New Year's tradition in Nordic countries of molybdomancy, or casting molten lead into snow to foretell the future.

)[11] The album's cover image is a 1538 woodcut by Hans Holbein the Younger, "Bones of All Men.