This paper investigates the application of N -continuous spectral projection precoding design to single-carrier frequency-division multiple access (SC-FDMA). It first considers a general orthogonal projection-based precoded system with an improved iterative receiver and analyzes its ultimate performance in an additive white Gaussian noise channel, both in terms of achievable throughput and symbol-error rates. For N -continuous SC-FDMA, the distribution of the symbol errors is very much asymmetric; a few base pulses carry the lion share of the self-induced interference, resulting in a zero throughput. We show that an optimized transmission and reception scheme based on a polarized use of the base pulses can satisfactorily deal with this asymmetry, and the end-to-end throughput can be recovered to be close to optimal. Applying a similar scheme to N -continuous OFDM enables also an improved performance in the high-SNR regime, where the interference effect strikes the most.