Lombardo contributed the album's title track, which expressed his desire for individuality: "I would write a song like 'I Don't Want to Grow Up' like, 'I don't want to grow up because I don't want to be like certain adults that were negatively influencing the world, he recalled in 2013, "not just 'I want to be a kid and live like a kid.' I don't want to grow up to be like "you"." Aukerman's lyrics to "Pervert" dealt with his conflicting feelings about his libido: "['Pervert'] is about how I like to have sex, but sometimes I like it so much that I think I'm perverted", he said in a mid-1980s interview. "Sometimes I want to have sex so much that I think I'm a pervert, so that's why I wrote the song. Even though sex is the healthiest thing in the world, the most natural thing, sometimes for some strange reason my psyche tells me that I should be a pervert for wanting to have it so much." The band learned the new material and recorded the album within a two-week period, leaving little time to rehearse the songs. In addition to the time constraint, they had lost the rehearsal space they had shared with Black Flag, and until the first day of recording were unable to practice with all of their equipment plugged in. As a result, the songs had much more of a pop sound on the album than they did when the band performed them live. "We could've put a lot more practice time into it," said Aukerman during the album's supporting tours, "but I think that the songs themselves are just really good songs. We play them all better now." "I Don't Want to Grow Up" was recorded in April 1985 at Music Lab studios in Hollywood with producer and engineer David Tarling, who had worked with Stevenson on the recording and production of Black Flag's "Loose Nut" (1985), "The Process of Weeding Out" (1985), and "In My Head" (1985). "He was really fond of those '80s production trappings, and the record is polluted and corrupted with them", Stevenson later reflected, complaining that "[It] sounds like all weird, reverby, crazy '80s shit." He also recalled that at one point Tarling passed out, leading Stevenson to take over the recording controls: "[He] was having some kind of problems or something, and he was drinking a lot, and he got so drunk while we were recording that he passed out.