the band's second frontman after his previous tenure as the band's drummer, while a drum machine took that place. The success of the band's debut album Box Frenzy (1987) led to increased interest of the band's second album. This Is the Day...This Is the Hour...This Is This! was produced by Flood, who one critic felt brought his notable production talent to the fore of the album, helping shape it into becoming "its own sprawling but self-contained universe." Dave Pine engineered the album with assistance from Karl Broadie.<ref name="booklet1">{{cite AV media notes| title = This Is the Day...This Is the Hour...This Is This!| others= Pop Will Eat Itself| year = 1989| type = liner| publisher = RCA}}</ref> Nonetheless, numerous songs on the album feature different engineers and producers; for example, "Can U Dig It?" was produced by David Steele and Andy Cox of Fine Young Cannibals and formerly The Beat, while "Def. Con. One" features production by Robert Gordon and turntable scratching from DJ Winston, both influential figures in the birth of Sheffield bleep techno. "Wild guitar" is contributed to two songs by The Buzzard, while "Stun guitar" is played by Frank Booth on "Preaching to the Perverted." MusicThis Is the Day...This Is the Hour...This Is This! features the band's unique "mesh and mix" of pop culture from the United States and particularly the United Kingdom, and combines metal guitar riffs, disco backing and conspicuous drum stomps. Influences of rap, heavy metal and the band's early influence of punk rock are spliced with numerous "found" auto artefacts "collected from all over the junk-culture landscape", including Motown snippets, advertising slogans and the "play-by-play call of a John Elway touchdown pass. Throughout the album, there are what AllMusic's Ned Raggett described as "intriguing surprises", including multiple moody goth and post-punk elements. The music press found the band's sound hard to categorise. Band member Graham Crabb explained: "Nobody's really come up with a description of what we do, and we're quite happy about that. It gives us absolute freedom." With the album's heavy usage of sampling, Trouser Press called the album a sound collage and noted the influence of the band's affection for Blade Runners "sci-fi nihilism" and the innovative comic books of Alan Moore. Joe Boehm of the LA Times agreed the album was an "assaultive" sound collage, writing that the eclectic album is a "funny smorgasboard in which a seemingly endless array