"Songs About Fucking" was released shortly after the band's breakup and went on to become their most successful record, with an initial pressing of eight thousand copies. Mark Deming of Allmusic calls it "a scabrous masterpiece", while his colleague Andy Kellman states that "each is incisive enough to render a razor as effective as a butter knife. In sum: yowl, ching, thump-thump-screech. Ugly characters line up in the songs like early arrivals at a monster truck rally." Critic Robert Christgau commented that "Anybody who thinks rock and roll is alive and well in the infinite variety of its garage-boy permutations had better figure out how these Hitler Youth rejects could crush the competition and quit simultaneously. No matter what well-meaning rockers think of Steve Albini's supremacist lies, they lie themselves if they dismiss what he does with electric guitars—that Killdozer sound culminates if not finishes off whole generations of punk and metal." Albini himself later considered the album's first side as Big Black's best output.