"[9] Please featured the number one hit "West End Girls" and nine other songs, including the singles "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)", "Love Comes Quickly", and "Suburbia".

[12] For their debut album, Pet Shop Boys wanted to work with Stephen Hague, the producer of Malcolm McLaren's "Madame Butterfly" and The World's Famous Supreme Team's "Hey DJ".

They sequenced the songs to form a loose storyline: "They run away in the first song ["Two Divided by Zero"], they arrive in the city ("West End Girls"), they want to make money ("Opportunities"), they fall in love ("Love Comes Quickly"), move to suburbia ("Suburbia"), go out clubbing ("Tonight Is Forever"), there's violence in the city ("Violence") and casual sex ("I Want a Lover"), someone tries to pick up a boy ("Later Tonight")".

They did not have time to record a new version, but Hague used elements from the single as well as the 12-inch mix by Ron Dean Miller, and re-recorded the vocals.

Lowe played trombone on "I Want a Lover", originally recorded with Blue Weaver prior to the album sessions.

When it was released as a single in September 1986, "Suburbia" was redone with producer Julian Mendelsohn and became the Pet Shop Boys' second top 10 hit in the UK.

[19] In the United States, Please is Pet Shop Boys' highest charting album, reaching number seven on the Billboard 200,[20] and it is their only record to be certified platinum by the RIAA with over one million sales.

The re-released version was digitally remastered and came with a second disc of B-sides and previously unreleased material from around the time of the album's original release.

[25] For their first album cover, Pet Shop Boys manager Tom Watkins presented them with a fold-out latticework model, but they thought it was too complicated.

In reaction, Mark Farrow created a minimalist white cover with a tiny photo of the duo in the center with their name and the title in small type underneath.

The photo, taken by Eric Watson, shows Lowe and Tennant with white towels on their shoulders and was chosen from existing images for the way it blended into the background.

In March 1986, Smash Hits reviewer Chris Heath gave the album a 9 out of 10 rating describing the content as "ten thoroughly catchy songs".

"[2] The Trouser Press Record Guide panned the album: "Please is a slick set of anonymous easy-listening disco tracks, brilliantly, soullessly produced (mostly by Stephen Hague), with ridiculous, overbearingly smug lyrics recited by Tennant… Ghastly, depressing and offensive.

[33] The AllMusic review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine called Please "A collection of immaculately crafted and seamlessly produced synthesized dance-pop" that "sketches out the basic elements of the duo's sound.