Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches is the third studio album by the English rock band Happy Mondays, released on 5 November 1990 by Factory Records.

The band went on a tour of the United States, and by the end of which, had started recording their next album with Oakenfold and Osborne at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles, California.

Described as a Madchester album, Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches saw substantial input from Oakenfold and Osborne, with the former making loops while the latter handled song arrangements.

Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches received generally positive reviews from music critics, several of whom considered it the band's creative peak.

[10] In February 1990, Happy Mondays' label in the United States, Elektra Records, picked them to contribute a cover for a 40th anniversary compilation album.

[13] Unbeknownst to Happy Mondays, Oakenfold and Osborne added vocals from session vocalist Rowetta, who had met McGough some weeks earlier at the Haçienda in Manchester.

[25] As the band would hang out with Mancunian and Liverpudlian people from acid house club nights in the area, the strained relationships were sedated.

[24][26] Recording started on 23 July 1990; the sessions would begin at midday and conclude by midnight, lasting for six days per week, with engineer Ray Blair and studio assistant Cameron.

[30] Due to Bez's lacklustre skills as a percussionist, session musician Tony Castro was brought in by Blair to contribute to "Loose Fit" and "Bob's Yer Uncle".

[40] They initially wanted "Tokoloshe Man" (1971), another Kongos cover, on the album, but were denied it when they contributed it to Elektra's anniversary compilation in lieu of "Step On".

Shaun Ryder took one of its lines for "Kinky Afro"; despite comparisons to "Lady Marmalade" (1974) by Labelle, he claimed the song's vocal hook was taken from the film Die Hard (1988).

[46] It opens with a slide guitar part, leading into a delta blues riff that is heard throughout the rest of the track; it is backed by a drum loop of "Me Myself and I" (1989) by De La Soul.

[34] McGough set about making Happy Mondays' next album a success; he was concerned with Factory's ad hoc licencing agreements, finding it difficult to obtain sales numbers from Rough Trade Records in Germany.

[35] With an advance from Wilson, McGough set up a distribution and licencing deal with major label London Recordings, which would promote the album throughout the European continent.

[66] The cover, done by Central Station Design, consists of American sweet wrappers, with the band's name and the album's title laid on top in cartoon lettering.

[79] Robertson said the song has a "very dark and sinister subtext" to it, and as such, Central Station Design "set about capturing this idea by composing a murkier experience" for its front artwork.

The back cover features burned fat to "simulate burnt, bubbling human flesh [which] was used to suggest the violence of warfare".

[91] Rhino Records reissued Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches as a two-disc set in 2007, with bonus tracks and a DVD of the band's music videos.

[95] "Kinky Afro" and remixes of "Loose Fit", "Bob's Yer Uncle", and "Step On" appeared on Happy Mondays' first compilation album, Double Easy – The U.S. Singles (1993).

[97] "Kinky Afro", "Loose Fit", "Bob's Yer Uncle", "Step On", and a remix of the latter appeared on the band's third compilation album, Greatest Hits (1999).

"[48] Los Angeles Times writer Jonathan Gold said any person with a "degree can tell you about pop’s post-modern condition, the simultaneous existence of all forms of music at once, but you rarely hear it expressed like this on a single record".

[103] The staff at CMJ New Music Report praised the band for being "more forward-thinking, diverse and downright interesting [on this album] than most would have imagined from previous dour efforts.

"[109] Select's Andrew Harrison referred to it as "ludicrously, expansively, stupidly excellent", going on to praise Oakenfold's DJ pedigree,[47] which the CMJ New Music Report staff also did.

"[110] In a less enthusiastic review, Bob Mack of Entertainment Weekly said that apart from "Step On" and "Donovan", the album shows that the band is less interesting than their Madchester contemporaries and does not warrant comparisons to the Rolling Stones.

[111] In a review for The Village Voice, critic Robert Christgau cited "Grandbag's Funeral" and "Kinky Afro" as highlights but stated that "their Voidoids is hotter than their 'dance music'".

In a review for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine called Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches a hedonistic album that was the peak of Happy Mondays' "career (and quite arguably the whole baggy/Madchester movement) ... a celebratory collage of sex, drugs, and dead-end jobs where there's no despair because only a sucker could think that this party would ever come to an end".

[49] Edward Sharp-Paul of FasterLouder said the band's tracks "still lived or died depending on whether the tone-deaf waster out front could think of something halfway coherent to mumble about.

[125][126] Oakenfold and Osborne were nominated for, but ultimately lost, the British Producer of the Year award at the 1991 Brits for their work on Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches.

[134] Ian Cohen suggested in Pitchfork that Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches was "perhaps the first example of a rock band reinventing themselves as a sampledelic hip-hop act.

"[105] In a retrospective piece for DJ Mag, journalist Ben Cardew said tracks such as "Kinky Afro", "Loose Fit", and "God's Cop" erased the "genre distinctions between rock, funk, soul, and dance music, making it sound perfectly natural for a band raised in rainy Manchester to create sunshine funk music.