Debaser forms: live, studio and demo. A version of this song was also used in the game "DJ Hero 2", remixed with The Prodigy's song "Invaders Must Die"; this mix is available as downloadable content for the game. The lyrics are based on a surrealist film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí called "Un Chien Andalou". The film includes a scene in which a woman's eye is slit by a razor, which is referenced in the song lyric "Slicin' up eyeballs/I want you to know." According to Black Francis: The title "Debaser" references the fact that "Un Chien Andalou" debases morality
The Big Swallow "makes imaginative use of an extreme close-up to create one of the seminal images of early British (and world) cinema, as effective in its way as the slashed eyeball of "Un Chien Andalou" (1929), and of just as much appeal to the Surrealist movement." The film, however, "might have been still more effective if Williamson had omitted the second and third shots," in which he, "cuts to the photographer apparently disappearing into a black void, and then back to the man who retires munching him up and expressing great satisfaction, "since they detract from the logical purity of the first,