Smith described the album as an often-satirical but deliberate reaction to the contemporary music scene, a stand against "bland bastards like Elvis Costello and Spandau Ballet ... [and] all that shit.

[2][3] The Fall recorded "Hip Priest", "Iceland" and non-album single "Look, Know" at the Hljóðriti studio in Reykjavík, and the remaining tracks in a disused cinema in Hitchin, Hertfordshire.

Its cover art was seen by many in the music industry as coarse and lacking accepted layout or typographical qualities; HMV would only shelve it back to front on their racks.

By 1981, the Fall had released three critically acclaimed albums, but band leader Mark E. Smith felt the group was undervalued and poorly supported by their label Rough Trade Records, whom he regarded as "a bunch of well meaning but inept hippies".

[4][5] Kamera's first release in November 1981 was the Fall's single "Lie Dream of a Casino Soul", which also featured drummer Karl Burns for the first time since Live at the Witch Trials.

According to critic John Doran, "uncertainty around a record label seeps into the album's sound, the work of a band with a gun pressed to their heads".

[5] Hex Enduction Hour takes influence from the Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray", Captain Beefheart and the early 1970s Krautrock band Can.

[8] Smith has said that the title was intended to invoke witchcraft,[9] that he concocted the word "Enduction" to suggest the album could be a listener's induction into the Fall and that "Hex" was a reference to this being the band's sixth release.

[10] His vocals are higher in the mix than on previous Fall releases and were described in 1982 by Sounds as "emerg[ing] like a loudhailer from a fog of guitar scratch".

[16] Opening track "The Classical" acts as a statement of intent similar to that in "Crap Rap 2/Like to Blow" from the Fall's debut album Live at the Witch Trials.

Whereas on the earlier song Smith described himself as "Northern white crap that talks back", in the opening lines of Hex Enduction Hour he complains that the fact that contemporary music lacks culture is his "brag", observing that a "taste for bullshit reveals a lust for a home of office" and references "obligatory niggers", before accusingly shouting "Hey there, fuckface, hey there, fuckface".

[19][20] "Jawbone and the Air Rifle" depicts a nightmarish folklore tale of a poacher (described as a "rabbit killer") bored by a decades-old marriage who escapes by roaming the local countryside at night hunting prey.

[21] "Hip Priest" was recorded in Iceland in a single take,[8][22] and is one of Smith's most personal songs, apparently written in bemusement following a recent rise in the band's popularity.

[28] The track contains a number of sounds played through a dictaphone, a device that was to feature heavily in later Fall albums, most notably This Nation's Saving Grace.

[B] It consists of a two-note piano figure and a banjo part,[28] over which Smith played a tape recording he had made of the wind howling outside his bedroom window.

[2] Hex Enduction Hour's all-white cover is lined with pen marks and scribbles and was described by music critic Robertson as "meticulously shoddy".

He mentioned how he was drawn to cheap and misspelled posters, amateur layouts of local papers and printed cash and carry signs with "inverted commas where you don't need them".

[2] Reviewing for the NME, Richard Cook described the band as tighter and more disciplined than in earlier recordings, and call Hex as "their master piece to date".

"[34] Later, Record Collector described the album as a "taut, twitchy and ominous masterclass in DIY post-punk", and singled out Smith's lyrics for praise.

[52] The album went out of print when the Kamera label folded in 1983, but a German edition on the Line imprint remained available, with copies pressed on white vinyl.