The second album from New Wave mutants Devo, 1979’s Duty Now for the Future was recorded right after the group’s breakthrough debut, which had turned the group into unlikely stars, even landing Devo a high-profile performance on Saturday Night Live. As the group’s Gerald Casale later noted: “Overnight, we went from being this little club band to having to rebook our upcoming tour to larger venues.” In some ways, Duty Now for the Future serves as a proper sequel to 1978’s Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, as it mostly consists of songs that had been part of Devo's arsenal for years, and that already been extensively road-tested. But on Duty Now for the Future, the group sheds much of the convulsive, punk-tinged cynicism that had been a hallmark of its first album, instead favoring a slightly more radio-ready sheen. The synthesizer had become increasingly more important to Devo sound (and would soon become more important to the New Wave scene as a whole). As a result, Duty Now for the Future is equal parts warm and mechanical, with synth-driven songs like “Wiggly World,” “Strange Pursuit,” and “S.I.B. (Swelling Itching Brain)” paving a way not only for Devo’s eventual Top 40 takeover, but also for the entire sound of the early 1980s. But Devo was always more than just a band—it was an audio-visual collective with a penchant for self-aware satire. And with Duty Now for the Future, the group presents itself as a piece of corporate product here to infect mainstream America: The cover is coated in UPC symbols, and featured a gimmicky (and expensive) punch-out postcard. The album even kicks off with a breezy instrumental inspired by the dystopian “corporate anthem” from the 1975 flick Rollerball.
 Ultimately, Duty Now for the Future wouldn’t turn the band into slick mainstream superstars—despite such tracks as the soaring “The Day My Baby Gave Me a Surprize,” or the fan-beloved cover of Johnny Rivers’ “Secret Agent Man,” which sounds as though it’s being performed by a robot on a surfboard. Still, Devo’s sophomore album finds the group perfecting its Future-friendly sound—one that was about to give these New Wave misfits an unlikely worldwide smash.