It is the follow-up to 's highly successful The Real Thing , and was the band's final album to feature guitarist Jim Martin. It was also the first album where vocalist Mike Patton had any substantial influence on the band's music, [ 5 ] [ 6 ] having been hired after the other band members had written and recorded everything for The Real Thing except vocals and most of the lyrics.
Angel Dust is Faith No More's best-selling album to date, having sold over 2. It also debuted at number 10 on the Billboard , making it the band's only top-ten album in the United States. Following the success of their previous album The Real Thing and its subsequent tour, Faith No More took a break for a year and a half before beginning work on the follow-up, Angel Dust.
During this time Mike Patton rejoined his high-school band Mr. Bungle to record their eponymous debut album. In an interview taken while they were in the studio he said that "Roddy [Bottum] wanted to name it Angel Dust , I don't know why, I just want you to know that if it's named Angel Dust , it didn't have anything to do with me.
Bottum stated that he chose the name because it "summed up what [they] did perfectly" in that "it's a really beautiful name for a really hideous drug and that should make people think. The photo of a group of Russian soldiers with the band members' faces inserted was edited by Werner Krutein and used as the cover of the " Midlife Crisis " single. The band had originally planned for this but then did not like the final product. That was a thing the record company really tried to foist on us. They really tried to fuck with our layout, and sent us these fucking pictures of us, just our heads.
It was like this, they wanted us to have a poster inside the record consisted of our five heads on a black background, everything was black, the whole inside, and it's like, 'Fuck you. The writing for Angel Dust took up most of [ 18 ] with large portion of the songs being written by either Billy Gould , Roddy Bottum , Mike Bordin , and for the first time, Mike Patton.
