Deceit is the second and final studio album by English experimental rock band This Heat, released in September 1981 by Rough Trade Records. As with their self-titled debut album, the tracks on Deceit were assembled from largely improvised recordings that the band accumulated since their inception in 1976, with varying degrees of audio quality. However, it is generally considered to be more song-oriented than its largely abstract predecessor. The title is in part a pun on the band's name. Deceit is regarded as a classic of the post-punk era, and was ranked at number 73 on Pitchfork'''s 2018 list of "The 200 Best Albums of the 1980s". Background Deceit was recorded between April and August 1981. As with previous This Heat recordings, much of the album was recorded in the band's own Cold Storage, a disused refrigerated storeroom at a former meat pie factory in Acre Lane, Brixton, England. The music included new improvisations along with songs the band had been playing during live performances; portions of these songs were culled from actual concert recordings, such as "Makeshift Swahili", which was assembled from three different performances. As drummer Charles Hayward describes, "some of the album was really plush sounding, some dim and pokey. Sometimes it would sound like the machinery was breaking up. We deliberately would make it sound as though the record player was exploding." In a 1991 interview, Hayward explained that the threat of nuclear warfare motivated the band and provided the album with an underlying theme: "The whole speak, 'Little Boy', 'Big Boy' , calling missiles cute little names. The whole period was mad! We had a firm belief that we were going to die and the record was made on those terms.… The whole thing was designed to express this sort of fear, angst, which the group was all about, really." The album's subject matter also deals with war and imperialism. Artwork The cover art for Deceit, designed by bandmember Gareth Williams and Nicholas Goddall in collaboration with Xerox artist Laurie-Rae Chamberlain, reflects the album's lyrical concerns, and includes a photomontage of images such as mushroom clouds, thematic maps depicting nuclear arsenals and photographs of Ronald Reagan, Leonid Brezhnev and Nikita Khrushchev. Charles Hayward explained that the album's cover photograph was achieved by using cut-out images from a Protect and Survive pamphlet, which were then assembled into a mask shape, photographed and projected over Williams' face.