The album was recorded in four days at Ultima Sound Studios in New York and featured Martin Rev's minimalist electronics and harsh, repetitive rhythms paired with Alan Vega's rock and roll-inspired vocals and depictions of urban life.

Upon its initial release, Suicide was greeted with some favorable reception from the UK press, but was universally panned in the United States, where it failed to chart.

[4] Suicide entered the studio with much of their songs already written and rehearsed from having spent the previous five years playing shows.

[10] All the songs on the album have a "stripped down" sound with Martin Rev providing a backing combining "harshly hypnotic organs" and "dense, unnerving electronics".

"[12][13] "Johnny" was described by the online music database AllMusic as a showcase for the band's "affinity for '50s melodies and images, as well as their pop leanings.

[5] "Frankie Teardrop" was influenced by a story Alan Vega read in a newspaper about a factory worker who lost his job and resorted to murdering his wife and child before committing suicide.

[19][20] Music journalist Tony Fletcher stated that the album "struggled for immediate attention" due to it being an independent release.

[30] The album received positive contemporary reviews from the NME, Time Out and Melody Maker in the United Kingdom.

[31] Writing in Sounds, Jon Savage was more circumspect, saying "Granted that the monotony is intentional, much of the cut is chilling – the screams and drift of the instrument into landscapes of blankness – and reaches the sought level of terror.

Music critic Robert Christgau gave the album a C+ rating, stating "there are little problems like lyrics that reduce serious politics to rhetoric, singing that makes rhetoric sound lurid, and the way the manic eccentricity of this duo's live performance turns to silliness on record"[21] Rolling Stone also gave Suicide a negative review, referring to the album as "absolutely puerile" and Alan Vega's vocals as "nothing but arrogance and wholesale insensibility".

[11] Tony Fletcher wrote in All Hopped Up and Ready to Go: Music from the Streets of New York 1927–77 that it would "in its own way", become as influential as other acclaimed punk albums such as Horses, Ramones and Marquee Moon.

Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder contacted Red Star to get the rights for "Frankie Teardrop" for his film In a Year of 13 Moons.

In 2008, a series of EPs were released in tribute to Suicide by various recording artists to celebrate Alan Vega's 70th birthday.