And I realized I wasn't getting any more words out of him. So I had to write a song a day so there was enough. Graham came with a couple of things, but there was no way he would come with enough songs to fill out the rest of the record. So I took an instant editorial decision that was what was going to happen. Some of those words stayed, and some of those words got worked on by Graham and me. That was it, basically." The band worked on more than a dozen songs, dropping those that were not "working quite well enough". Many of the songs were recorded in a single take, the band playing as a threesome: "You have to understand, as a three-piece, we'd very rarely played together. So [for Red Barked Tree,] I thought, 'Let's see how it goes in the studio.' We worked with an engineer that we'd never worked with before, who was Irish. We did 'Moreover,' and after we were done playing, he came in and said, 'You make a big fookin' noise for three.'" The band felt vindicated. The album was released digitally on 20 December 2010, and in CD format on 10 January 2011, on the band's Pink Flag label. It was Wire's twelfth studio album, their third since the turn of the millennium, and the second since the departure of Gilbert. The Wire website, pinkflag.com, announced that the first 2,000 mail order customers for "Red Barked Tree" would also receive a free copy of "Strays", a bonus EP featuring new studio recordings of the songs "Underwater Experiences", "He Knows", "German Shepherds" and "Boiling Boy". While it took the band three months to come up with a title for their last album, "Object 47", they almost immediately agreed on naming the current record "Red Barked Tree". According to Lewis, the cover artwork by Jon Wozencroft – based on a photograph showing a detail of an untitled work by Arte Povera artist Jannis Kounellis – reflects the idea of alchemy as a quest for knowledge. A press release announcing the album stated that it "rekindles a lyricism sometimes absent from Wire's previous work and reconnects with the live energy of performance, harnessed and channeled from extensive touring over the past few years". Featuring songs that "range from the hymnal 'Adapt' to the barking sledgehammer art-punk of 'Two Minutes', the album encompasses the full palette of style and nuance that has always endeared Wire to pastel-tinged pop aficionados and bleeding-edge avant-rockers alike."