The album marked a significant departure from the band's early indie rock sound, drawing inspiration from the blossoming house music scene and associated drugs such as LSD and MDMA.

Much of the album's production was handled by acid house DJ Andrew Weatherall and engineer Hugo Nicolson, who remixed original recordings made by the band into dance-oriented tracks.

When asked what his influences were for Screamadelica, singer Bobby Gillespie said that Primal Scream were like a rock'n'roll band who had quite diverse taste.

[15] Gillespie has also cited Nico's album The Marble Index as a major influence when they were making Screamadelica, claiming he "listened to [it] all the time.

Weatherall and Gillespie bonded over "Thin Lizzy, dub-reggae, Mott The Hoople, disco music" and they were both attracted by "industrial, experimental funk".

So he could take our songwriting and our instrumental[s] [...] And the melodies and the gospel singers and the strings and the slate guitars, we played a lot of synthesisers as well.

[14] He began remixing "I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have", from their previous album, and the resulting track disassembled the song, adding a drum loop from an Italian bootleg mix of Edie Brickell's "What I Am" and a sample from the Peter Fonda B movie The Wild Angels.

It appears on the Dixie-Narco EP, released in 1992, and is featured in the opening credits of the now rare Screamadelica VHS video tape.

[17] Cannell was inspired by a damp water spot he'd seen on the Creation Records offices ceiling after taking LSD.

In a contemporary review for Spin, Simon Reynolds called it a "totally mind-blowing" record whose best songs were "almost unclassifiable".

[34] AllMusic writer Stephen Thomas Erlewine deemed Screamadelica "an album that transcends its time and influence.

"[35] Robert Christgau of The Village Voice, on the other hand, assigned it a "neither" rating, indicating an album that does not warrant repeated listening despite coherent craft and one or two highlights.

[citation needed] It was ranked number 437 in the 2020 revised edition of Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time,[48] and No.

A Northern soul version was also recorded by Edwin Starr for the cult British surfing film Blue Juice.

Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo of French electronic duo Daft Punk, who drew inspiration from the rock and acid house in the United Kingdom during the early 1990s, referred to Screamadelica as the record that "put everything together in terms of genre".

[53] Additionally, Columbia released the Demodelica album on 15 October 2021, with early demos and work-in-progress mixes, accompanied by notes by Jon Savage.