According to critic Michael Waynick, the album's lyrics explore a wide palette of 20th century dystopian fantasies, ranging from "Soviet-style social realism to state-sponsored lobotomy," while writer Daryl Easlea describes the album as modernistic and "full of "1984"-style portent." The music is characterised by its mechanical synthesizers, harsh guitars and frenzied rhythms. By emphasising synthesised instrumentation, and eschewing guitar solos, the record marks a firm departure from Be-Bop Deluxe, with Red Noise moving Nelson into a new wave direction, although a guitar solo does appear on "The Atom Age". Nelson wrote some songs to break from "the idea of a rhythm which starts at point A and goes to point B by a logical progression," instead building songs like "Don't Touch Me (I'm Electric)", "Stop/Go/Stop" and "Radar in My Heart" in a more abnormal fashion until the results were "a little bit angular; you can't just flow through them, yet their urgency creates its own kind of flow." The musician described the musical structure of "Art/Empire/Industy" as a jokey experiment "using a kind of Beatles' 'Twist & Shout' build-up but with modern instrumentation and techniques." He wrote "Stop/Go/Stop" – which features the line "To Central Information, from Intelligence Patrol/We all must follow orders, obey remote control" – in 1977 about his future-wife Jan while he was still married to his first wife. He married Jan by the recording of "Sound-on-Sound" and reflected on the song: "I'd been trying to tell Jan how I felt about her through my songs. They were born out of this heady love I was feeling for her." The sleeve of "Sound-on-Sound" was designed by Japanese artist Bishin Jumonji, and depicts a bed-ridden robot constructed of both electronic and electromechanical components, chosen by Nelson to represent the album's 'mundane, domestic' themes. The back cover features an "Important Notice" writing that the album was "styled with today's hi-fi in mind," saying that the record should be "played at high volume in a room with no views other than those affored by the use of subliminal image video apparatus." Nelson said he wrote the notice with his "tongue firmly in cheek". During the band's live performances, the group wore Red Army-style matching uniforms and used intricate lighting to "underline the point of the music," according to Nelson, who elaborated: "The songs are about the impending gloom of 1984, the austerity and the indoctrination.