Duty Now for the Future is the second studio album by American new wave band Devo, released on June 1, 1979, by Warner Bros. Records. Produced by Ken Scott, the album was recorded between September 1978 and early 1979 at Chateau Recorders in Hollywood.

Both Duty Now for the Future and its predecessor, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! (1978), contained material from a backlog of songs the band had written between 1974 and 1977. By December 1976, Devo were already performing "Clockout", "Timing X" and "Blockhead" live, following the expansion of the band's line-up from a quartet to a quintet, with the addition of drummer Alan Myers (replacing Jim Mothersbaugh) and multi-instrumentalist Bob Casale. "Clockout" took advantage of this newly expanded line-up and featured Bob Casale playing bass instead of Gerald Casale. "Smart Patrol/Mr. DNA" was already being performed by November 1977.

While the song selections for the band's first two albums were devised ahead of time, Mark Mothersbaugh brought in three new compositions ("The Day My Baby Gave Me a Surprize", "S.I.B. (Swelling Itching Brain)" and "Triumph of the Will") for the second album's sessions and elected to abandon some of the previously chosen songs. Bob Mothersbaugh later stated that "We had been touring extensively after the first album; maybe we rushed to get another album out." In a 2015 interview, Gerald Casale said that the new material "was kind of still incubating and probably wasn't ready" at the time of recording.

"Devo Corporate Anthem" and its accompanying video were a nod to the 1975 film Rollerball, in which the titular sport is preceded by players and the audience standing solemnly while listening to a regional "corporate hymn". "Triumph of the Will" takes its title from Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda film of the same name, although the song is about desire. Music historian Andy Zax stated that, "On the surface, 'The Day My Baby Gave Me a Surprize' seems like one of Devo's happiest, bounciest pop confections, but a closer look reveals peculiar things lurking beneath." The band's cover of Johnny Rivers' "Secret Agent Man" features a rare lead vocal from Bob Mothersbaugh.

Duty Now for the Future was produced by Ken Scott. Like Brian Eno, who had produced Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, Scott had also worked with David Bowie, most notably on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) and Aladdin Sane (1973). According to Scott, Devo were "quite professional in the studio" and he "loved every minute" of the sessions.

Recording for the album began in September 1978, a month after the release of their first album. Scott discussed his role in the recordings and how Devo came to choose him for the album: "I know they chose me because of the Bowie records I did, but I don't know if it was a direct recommendation from Mr. Jones. Devo always wanted to learn. That's why they worked with each producer only once."

Duty Now for the Future found the band bringing synthesizers more into the forefront than before. Additionally, guitar sounds were often manipulated; in a 1979 interview with BAM magazine, Gerald Casale stated, "A guitar can only do what a guitar does. It's like only one tiny piece of a synthesizer. On this album, we did much more with the guitars, too. Sometimes you don't know that they're guitars." According to Scott, to record the solo for "Secret Agent Man", they "overloaded mic amps and fed the signal through headphones which were taped to the mic."

Several band members voiced dissatisfaction with the sound of the album in retrospect. Gerald Casale has stated that "Scott wanted something processed. We wanted something aggressive." Bob Mothersbaugh felt that Scott did not understand the band's "ideas and vision." Mark Mothersbaugh recalled that, at the time, he thought Scott had erred in recording the album one instrument at a time to a click track—to emphasize the band's tight, robotic qualities—rather than recapturing their live sound. Mothersbaugh ultimately felt that the results were not as satisfying as playing the material on the following tour. However, Casale later stated that Mothersbaugh, who loved synthesizers, had already wanted to move the band away from guitars.