Along with containing some of the band's most impenetrable walls of sound and an eleven-minute track composed almost entirely of manipulated and distorted samples, Last Rights also features Skinny Puppy's first ballad.

[2] cEvin Key and Dwayne Goettel believed that vocalist Nivek Ogre was more interested in pursuing his solo career than maintaining Skinny Puppy, and his abuse of drugs (specifically injected cocaine and heroin)[3][4] exacerbated the schism.

[6][7] Dave Ogilvie, longtime producer and temporary member of Skinny Puppy during the 1988 VIVIsectVI sessions, acted as a middleman between the two halves of the band.

[13] Because the band had access to new equipment, Key and Goettel spent more time on the post-production of Last Rights than on any other Skinny Puppy album, specifically on noisy and complicated songs like "Scrapyard" and "Download".

[21] The band obtained Leary's permission to use his voice,[23] but Henry G. Saperstein, owner of the copyright, threatened to sue Skinny Puppy if they released the song.

[28][26][29] It still retains the band's electro-industrial roots and even has some dance aspects,[29][30] but those elements give way to a heavy emphasis on walls of noise,[28] atonal and highly distorted percussion,[27] Ogre's agonized screaming,[29] and, alternatively, moments of unusual melodicism.

[34] Compared to Skinny Puppy's previous work, Last Rights is a more internal and personal album,[12][19] with some publications seeing it as prophetic of the band's eventual demise.

[35][24] Musically, the song starts with reversed and slow-motion samples before transitioning into a driving drum machine loop underlain with Ogre's rasped vocals.

[27] Though almost all of the industrial metal influence that Al Jourgensen brought into Skinny Puppy with the 1989 album Rabies is absent on Last Rights, "Knowhere?"

[27] AllMusic's John Bush saw the song as the album's pinnacle, calling it a "heart-stopping single whose production contributed just as much to the air of menace as Ogre's vocals".

[33] The sixth song, "Scrapyard", is another assault of unconventional noises with jarring rhythmic stops,[27] contrasting periods of acoustic guitar with growled vocals and relentlessly pounding kick drums.

[31] "Lust Chance", another largely instrumental song, provides an eerie combination of pornographic audio samples, reverberating and repetitious bass drums, and manipulated electronic sounds.

[20] Last Rights' ninth and penultimate track, "Circustance", begins with more gloomily optimistic sounds and quickly descends into loud percussion drowning out Ogre's agonized mumbles.

About this song, Valois wrote, "carnival and cartoon giddiness, pig-like snorts and speedway radio static blip by, only to end in a soothing mantra of wind blowing over glass bottles or Peruvian pan pipes.

[40] The stage show for Last Rights was less overtly violent and grotesque than on previous Skinny Puppy tours,[4] focusing instead on coming to terms with negative emotions.

[40] During 1990's Too Dark Park tour, the band played clips from Japanese snuff films in the Guinea Pig series and were surprised by the audience reactions; apparently, many perceived the gruesome images as real.

[41] Ogre, dismayed by fans who enjoyed the explicit gore for the wrong reasons, wanted to shift the band's live tone to something more conceptual and introspective.

[14] Tim Gore, the band's manager and assistant in designing the Too Dark Park shows, helped Ogre come up with the more nuanced set of theatrics,[42] resulting in Skinny Puppy's most ambitious and prop-heavy tour.

[40] In preparation for the upcoming Last Rights shows, Ogre and William Morrison recorded and edited sixty-six minutes of backing video to sync up with the live performances.

The two main elements, a virtual reality machine and a spinning display of severed heads called the Tree of No Cares, were set up on either side of the stage.

[3] Only appearing for the performance of "Left Handshake" at the end of each show, the Guiltman combined imagery of drug abuse and deformed sexuality to represent Ogre at the lowest point of addiction.

[41] Some Canadian prints of Last Rights mistakenly featured the CD art from "Tormentor" (1990), a single off of Skinny Puppy's previous album, Too Dark Park.

[44] Despite these troubles, Last Rights was the group's first album to chart on the Billboard 200, peaking at position 193 and becoming Skinny Puppy's most popular release at the time.

[24] Ultimately, Last Rights did not receive a second single until 2000, when "Left Handshake", the song cut from the album due to legal concerns, was issued in a limited capacity under the title "Track 10".

John Bush of AllMusic considered the album Skinny Puppy's technical and artistic peak, going so far as to call it a "sonic masterpiece" that was "ten years ahead of its time".

Dave Morrison of Select called the album "a huge stir-fried noise that's genuinely astonishing at times, but generally unfocused, often collapsing under its own weight".