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AllMusic
Encyclopedia of Popular Music
The Guardian
Mojo
Pitchfork Media	10/10
Q
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
Spin Alternative Record Guide	10/10
Uncut
The Village Voice	B+

This Nation's Saving Grace is the eighth studio album by English post-punk band the Fall. It was released in 1985 by Beggars Banquet, and is widely considered one of their masterpieces. According to The Guardian, the album "finds [The Fall] operating just on the edge of the mainstream and at the peak of their accessibility and yet strangeness".

It reached number 54 in the UK Albums Chart.

Paul Hanley left the Fall in November 1984, leaving Karl Burns as the sole drummer and ending the band's classic dual drummer lineup. His brother, longtime Fall bassist Steve Hanley, took four months of paternity leave in late 1984, replaced by Simon Rogers, a classically trained musician whom frontman Mark E. Smith knew from the dancer Michael Clarke.

After Steve Hanley's return, Rogers switched to guitar and keyboards. Smith marked Hanley's reappearance with the inscription "S Hanley! He's Back" on the run-out groove on Side 1.

"Yarbles" (from the song titled "To NK Roachment: Yarbles") appears in the novel A Clockwork Orange as Nadsat for testicles or bollocks. The song's lyrics "Every day you have to die some/Every day you have to cry some" may be an allusion to the Arthur Alexander song "Every Day I Have To Cry Some" or possibly to similar lines in the Lou Reed song "Home of the Brave", from his 1983 album Legendary Hearts.

"I Am Damo Suzuki" is a tribute to the seminal 1970s Krautrock group Can and their occasional vocalist Damo Suzuki. The riff descending in semitones is based on the end section of "Bel Air" from the Can album Future Days (a similar progression also features in "Don't Turn the Light On, Leave Me Alone" from the Soundtracks album), while the drum pattern is based on "Oh Yeah" from Tago Mago.

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