Packaging is a six-panel gatefold jacket with an LP-sized 12-page booklet. One side of this two-LP, 180-gram set features an etching of a design.
"…It's probably the most adventurous, experimental and ballsy album released on a major label since Green Day's revelatory American Idiot, which also happens to be its closest kin, in spirit at least. Because for all its growling electronics, squelching guitars and plinking African kalimbas, Year Zero is essentially a punk-rock album, one born of the same bold attitude that drove Green Day to jettison traditional thinking while making Idiot." – MTV.com