The sixth studio album by Gang of Four. Written by Andy and Jon King and produced by Andy.

Some of the tracks were written for the soundtrack of the movie Delinquent, written and directed by Peter Hall, who recalled:

“When I wrote my movie Delinquent, I sent the script to my very good friends, Andy Gill and Jon King of Gang of Four. I wanted to know what they thought because they were vital artists who were extremely well-read, and their criticism would obviously be very helpful. They shocked me by offering to create the score for next to nothing (Andy recorded it in an empty flat next door to his)*, and did a striking job.”

*Note from Andy’s widow, Catherine: ‘There was no ‘empty flat’. It was recorded like everything else from that period in what should have been our living room.

Excerpt from Paul Lester’s Damaged Gods, published in 2008:

“In 1992, towards the end of the US tours promoting Mall, Andy Gill and Jon King were offered the soundtrack for an intriguing film by writer/director Peter Hall, about an adolescent boy who murders his abusive father and gets away with it. At some point in the process of recording the soundtrack, it became clear that what they were working on was, in fact, destined to be another Gang of Four album. That album turned out to be 1995’s Shrinkwrapped.

“It remains one of my favourite Gang of Four records along with Entertainment! and Solid Gold,” says Gill, by implication acknowledging that in retrospect, Mall didn’t go quite according to plan. “This time, through bitter experience, we didn’t let things through when we weren’t entirely sure about them. We went over stuff again and again. We did a lot of it by fax. Jon would send some lyrics and I’d annotate them, line by line, what was good and what wasn’t. We were really going to take the record to task, and it shows”

From Hugh Gilmour, artwork designer for Shrinkwrapped (July 2022):

“I worked as an in-house graphic designer at Castle in 1995, so technically I was the art director / designer on the project, but it was based on any wacky ideas that Andy Gill had summoned that day, as he sat next to me at my Apple Mac in Chessington. Little known fact; that’s actually Oprah Winfrey on the cover, but the photo library said we couldn’t put her on the cover without her permission – really? – so I had to use someone else’s head. Another day he’d come into the office and ask for photo library shots of car crashes, which I found a bit macabre. The original album title was ‘Dark Ride’, so we expected him to drive to the office in a black hearse, but it was actually a small, red, family car, which weirdly was the same model of the car in the car crash photo he chose for the booklet.

“Anton Corbijn took the promo photos, which we couldn’t use for the album art, but I designed some nice posters with them. For the single cover, he wanted the text to look like it was on a TV screen, so we actually got Ken Morse – probably the most famous rostrum camera man in the country – to film my print-out, then I photographed that. I’d just use a Photoshop filter now, but that wasn’t possible in 1995. I was only 25 at the time.”

Album reviews:

“When bands come back from a decade of breakup, a passable LP is practically a victory. That Shrinkwrapped is a firecracker, and would be a firecracker no matter who made it, is cause for a goddamn party. That Andy Gill is a dangerous guitar player again is a particularly ‘stop the presses, prodigal returns’ payoff. Pop a cork and put this one on for all your pals, and watch them come up and say, ‘Who is this?’ They are officially back.” – Jack Rabid, AllMusic.

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