Cherry Red Records released a two-disc deluxe edition of the album in 2011 that includes unreleased bonus tracks.

Band member Graham Crabb said: "We revived this '70s [slang] word for dork or nerd, and the press had to build this movement around it to describe everyone with long hair and a nasty guitar sound.

"[3] The band thought their musical style was "pretty much going down a cul de sac" until they found numerous other "more interesting" influences.

was produced by Flood, who one critic felt brought his notable production talent to the fore of the album, helping shape it into becoming "its own sprawling but self-contained universe.

One" features production by Robert Gordon and turntable scratching from DJ Winston, both influential figures in the birth of Sheffield bleep techno.

[11] Influences of rap, heavy metal and the band's early influence of punk rock are spliced with numerous "found" auto artefacts "collected from all over the junk-culture landscape", including Motown snippets, advertising slogans and the "play-by-play call of a John Elway touchdown pass.

[3] Throughout the album, there are what AllMusic's Ned Raggett described as "intriguing surprises", including multiple moody goth and post-punk elements.

[2] Joe Boehm of the LA Times agreed the album was an "assaultive" sound collage, writing that the eclectic album is a "funny smorgasboard in which a seemingly endless array of pop styles and media messages are sampled, tasted and either spat out or savoured (Rick Astley, nuclear warfare, fast food and alcoholism fail to meet the taste test; science-fiction fantasy and pop styles that are noisy, emphatic, and identified with troublemakers win the blue ribbon).

[12]In Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola's book Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling, they write that the album made extreme usage of sampling, noting its excessive samples from songs (including two songs by Salt 'n' Pepa, three songs by Public Enemy, "Bike" by Pink Floyd, "We Care a Lot" by Faith No More, "That's Right" by Mantronix, "Shout" by Tears for Fears, "Jungle Law" by Love & Rockets, "Foxy Lady" by Jimi Hendrix, "Astley's in the Noose" by The Wonder Stuff and "Paid in Full" by Eric B. and Rakim), as well as samples of the films RoboCop, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Deer Hunter, Evil Dead II, Dirty Harry, Casablanca and The Warriors, as well as a Rice Krispies television commercial, The Twilight Zone and the Super Bowl XXII.

[8] One of the songs which "really taps into the heart of PWEI’s science-fiction obsession",[15] "Inject Me" features a breakbeat and "murky" beginning,[8] With its "shady" and "creepy" sustained narrative, it starts with what appears to be a "first-person reverie of some slacker junkie", with the song's introductory lyrics whispered by Crabb, whose voice becomes more paranoid and sharper when the verse begins, with science-fiction-style lyrics forming the rest of the song, though one critic noted that "it's unclear whether the whole SF scenario is happening only in the narrator's addled brainpan.

are largely a list of things the band loves, including Dirty Harry,[8] DJ Spinderella,[8] The Twilight Zone[15] and V for Vendetta.

One" samples Siouxsie Sioux, Rod Serling, the Beastie Boys, as well as paying homage to the Stooges and "Funkytown by Lipps, Inc. in a "seamless dadaist stew.

"[17] Anderson called the artwork a mixture of "medieval information technology – digital (Mac and Amiga) vs. mechanical (paste-up and graph paper).

[17] Steve Mason of AllMusic felt the packaging was inspired by an earlier Designer's Republic album sleeve, that of Age of Chance's One Thousand Years of Trouble (1987).

Anderson explained: "Really, it’s another consumerist thing, it doesn’t have any of the meanings that people have attributed to it […] I was just sitting at home looking at my shelves when I thought of it.

One" was released by the band's early label Chapter 22 on 1 July 1988, reaching number 63 on the UK Singles Chart.

As such, writers Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola noted that it was unusual the album was released on a major label, musing that "it is hard to believe that the record company was clueless about its content.

[3] On 25 September 2011, Cherry Red Records released a special edition of the album that features a bonus disc of rare and unreleased tracks.

[25] Ned Raggett of AllMusic said the album was "brilliant" and "underrated", adding that "the band's sound has never been thicker and more detailed, and while the sampling and arranging are always clearly a product of their late-'80s times, like the Beasties did that year with Paul's Boutique, PWEI comes up with its own sharp synthesis.

"[11] He later described the album as "Pop Will Eat Itself's crowning moment—an exciting, energetic, and very modern English response to the Beastie Boys' own culture-gobbling antics.

"[26] Trouser Press were very favourable to the album, calling it an "aurally exciting sonic collage" and concluding that, "bright, vital and bitingly funny, this record teems with invention.

"[13] In his book Cinema Detours, Mike White said the album was the most notable of several examples of pop culture to use lines from the film The Warriors.

[31] Ned Raggett also commented that the "fair dollop of moody goth/post-punk touches" on the album inadvertently predicted where the group Massive Attack "partially ended up.

"[32] Jason Heller of Tor.com called the album the band's "opus" and "a writhing pile of punk, rap, samples, and geek-culture references."