"Give Up" is considered a combination of indie rock and electronic music—dubbed by some "indietronica". MTV's Brian Wallace described the sound of the album as a collision between "moody indie rock with the manipulated samples, keyboards and beats of IDM electronica." Programmed elements are accentuated with acoustic guitars and live drums. Critics compared it to the eighties synthpop and new wave genres. Pitchfork Media's Matt LeMay and AllMusic's Heather Phares both commented on the contrasts between the "cool, clean synths" and Gibbard's vocal melodies. Nearly every synthesized element on the album utilizes the K2000RS, a sampler produced by Kurzweil Music Systems. The device came with bass and synthesizer presets, though Tamborello would significantly alter each preset to make it more original. His computer at the time was a Macintosh Quadra, which was not sufficiently powerful enough to record audio with. Tamborello utilized it as a sequencer, controlling the K2000RS with MIDI. He would program the drum patterns in the computer. He also used an Apple PowerBook G4, a small laptop computer, to record the album.