Automatic for the People

Some of the material came from demos made at Paisley Park in December 1990. Formal writing began in June 1991, with the band members swapping instruments. They made about 30 demos, plus a set in New Orleans in February 1992, and the final recording began at Bearsville on March 30, 1992. Strings were recorded in Atlanta, and the orchestration was scaled back from Out of Time. John Paul Jones wrote the string arrangements for Drive, The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite, Everybody Hurts and Nightswimming. The sleeve photographs are by Anton Corbijn.

It reached No. 1 in the United Kingdom, four separate times, and No. 2 in the United States, sold about 18 million copies worldwide and was nominated for the 1994 Grammy for Album of the Year, which went to the soundtrack of The Bodyguard. Paul Evans of Rolling Stone wrote that the band revealed a darker vision that shimmers with new, complex beauty, and Allan Jones of Melody Maker put R.E.M. at the very top of their form. Rolling Stone placed it at No. 96 in its 2020 list of the 500 greatest albums.

Reviewing the 25th anniversary reissue for Pitchfork in 2017, Stuart Berman described an album fixated on the past, on aging and death, that arrived in the grunge era, when the band stepped aside rather than compete with louder records. He noted that the video for the opener Drive is a black and white mosh pit, and that the song quotes Rock Around the Clock and Rock On.