 While songs such as "Overcome" and "Suffocated Love" dealt with themes of "sexual paranoia and male dread of intimacy", the rest of Maxinquaye explored the psychological tolls of the British recreational drug culture, which Reynolds said served as a "temporary utopia" for a generation of users who otherwise lacked a "constructive outlet for its idealism". He felt the album's cover art, featuring rusting metal surfaces, represented the cultural decline explored in the music's themes. Tricky drew on Rastafarian ideas about end time for the record, although unlike adherents to that movement he did not disassociate himself from "Babylon", or the degenerate qualities of Western society, writing lyrics such as "my brain thinks bomb-like / beware of our appetite" on "Hell Is Round the Corner". He later told Reynolds, "I 'm part of this fuckin' psychic pollution ... It's like, I can be as greedy as you. The conditioned part of me says' yeah, I 'm gonna go out and make money, I'm going to rule my own little kingdom. '" Christgau deemed the album's songs "audioramas of someone who's signed on to work for the wages of sin and lived to cash the check", while O'Hagan said Tricky's "impressionistic prose poems" were written from the deviant perspective of the urban hedonist: "Maxinquaye is the sound of blunted Britain, paranoid and obsessive ... This was the inner-city blues, Bristol style".
