Recorded mostly in a room in a south London house rented at the time by principal member Mike Skinner, the album is musically influenced by UK garage and American hip hop, while its lyrics tell stories of British working-class life.

[3] Journalist Simon Reynolds identified the album's lyrical content as capturing UK garage's "submerged reality" as a genre not based in nightclubs.

Outside London in the late 1990s, UK garage was rarely played in clubs but was instead found on pirate radio stations, reflected by the album's title.

[5] The instrumental tracks were created on an IBM ThinkPad, while Skinner used an emptied out wardrobe as a vocal booth using duvets and mattresses to reduce echo.

"[15] Q called Skinner a "vital new voice" and described Original Pirate Material as "starkly observed vignettes ... this debut wittily and wisely documents young lives spent in piss-poor pubs, estate bedrooms and kebab shops...

But their very ordinariness and the brutish, unadorned simplicity of the music is part of their appeal, evoking the everyday tedium of real 'youth culture' ... A uniquely British voice.

On Original Pirate Material, Skinner nails the quiet desperation of the white working class like a pub-hooligan Marshall Mathers, with all of Slim Shady's good humor and none of his insanity.