The earlier single "Look, Know" was recorded during the Icelandic sessions but not included on the album. This was characteristic of Smith's "never look back" approach. Opening track "The Classical" acts as a statement of intent similar to that in "Crap Rap 2/Like to Blow" from the Fall's debut album Live at the Witch Trials. Whereas on the earlier song Smith described himself as "Northern white crap that talks back", in the opening lines of Hex Enduction Hour he complains that the fact that contemporary music lacks culture is his "brag", observing that a "taste for bullshit reveals a lust for a home of office" and references "obligatory niggers", before accusingly shouting "Hey there, fuckface, hey there, fuckface". Pavement released a cover of the track in the early 1990s; Smith later dismissed them as mere Fall copyists. "Jawbone and the Air Rifle" depicts a nightmarish folklore tale of a poacher (described as a "rabbit killer") bored by a decades-old marriage who escapes by roaming the local countryside at night hunting prey. One night the protagonist "lets out a misplaced shot", which draws the Hex of the "Broken Brothers Pentacle Church". The song's main focal point is toward the end when the lyrics detail a series of semi-religious, semi-pagan horrific and repeating hallucinations. "Hip Priest" was recorded in Iceland in a single take, and is one of Smith's most personal songs, apparently written in bemusement following a recent rise in the band's popularity. The track has been compared to dub but in its Northern bleakness "it had been invented in a drizzly motorway rather than in recording studios in Jamaica." "Hip Priest" was re-recorded in 1988 in a glam rock style as "Big New Prinz" for the album "I Am Kurious Oranj". An excerpt of "Hip Priest" was used in 1991 in the climactic end scene of Jonathan Demme's film The Silence of the Lambs. "Fortress/Deer Park" starts with a Casio VL-1 rhythm preset, the same as used by Trio on the 1982 hit single "Da Da Da". Its lyrics form a broad and jaundiced look at English culture and subcultures in the early 1980s. It mentions "Good King Harry was there, fucking Jimmy Savile" while the lines "I took a walk down W11; I had to walk through 500 European punks" are a dry put-down of the fashion-oriented. "Winter" is split into two parts, broken by a fade out and