Stylistically different from his previous albums, Swordfishtrombones moves away from conventional piano-based songwriting towards unusual instrumentation and a somewhat more abstract and experimental rock approach.

Per The Guardian, "These are records of startling originality and playfulness, of cacophonous discord and sudden heartbreaking melody, in which it seemed the artist was trying to incorporate the whole history of American song into his loose-limbed poetic storytelling.

Per AllMusic, Lyrically, Waits' tales of the drunken and the lovelorn have been replaced by surreal accounts of people who burned down their homes and of Australian towns bypassed by the railroad -- a world (not just a neighborhood) of misfits now have his attention.

The music can be primitive, moving to odd time signatures, while Waits alternately howls and wheezes in his gravelly bass voice.

[5]The cover art is a TinTone photograph by Michael A. Russ[6][7] showing Waits with the actors Angelo Rossitto and Lee Kolima.

That an artist with a gift for writing tunes so evocative of memories real and imagined would decisively rend the fabric of his well-established image, and trade in coolly louche atmospherics for neon-lit junkyard sonic grotesquery was a perverse strategy that I couldn’t help admiring.