The release was accompanied by a music video, featuring a short clip of the band in a quarry slowed down to fit the song's length.

Black Francis said of the lyrics to the song in an interview with SongFacts, "It's folklore based; the Rosicrucians of 1920s San Jose California had some pretty interesting ideas.

"[1] The lyrics allude to the mythical lost continent of Lemuria and the Rosicrucians' belief that its survivors lived beneath Mount Shasta.

There's this lost continent of Lemuria, as in the lemurs from Madagascar sank in the pacific and all of the inhabitants took off and entered into that hollowed out mountain called Mount Shasta.

[2]Producer Gil Norton claimed the song was also inspired by Francis's fascination with UFOs and extraterrestrials: "He was trying to write about space, a superhero-type person, and he had this material, velour, that he really liked the touch of, and that's where he got the 'Velouria' from, what she would wear.

Of the song's B-sides, "I've Been Waiting for You" is a Neil Young cover sung by Kim Deal,[5] while "Make Believe" is a David Lovering-sung track written about Lovering's admitted "obsession" with US singer-songwriter Debbie Gibson.

[9]In the video, 23 seconds of footage (the time needed for the band members to reach the camera) is slowed in order to last for the duration of the song.

[10] However, the effort in filming the video was in vain; Pixies did not play "Velouria" on Top of the Pops while the single was in the charts.

Entertainment Weekly wrote in a 1990 review that the song is "intense" and "has both strangely shivering guitars and a melodic refrain that cascades over the surface of the music like waves crashing on a devastated beach.