The album was released in four editions: Double vinyl, cassette (the band's final release on the medium), compact disc, and a limited-edition box set with the CD and fold-out posters by 14 artists illustrating the songs.[8]
"The Outsiders" features a guest appearance by rapper
Q-Tip. When the song was performed live, Michael Stipe carried out the rap, as he did on a later
B-side release of the song.
"Final Straw" is a politically charged song. The version on the album is a remix of the original version, which had been made available as a free download on March 25, 2003, from the band's website. The song was written in protest of the U.S. government's actions in the
Iraq War. The song evolved from an instrumental demo titled "Harlan County with Whistling," recorded during the sessions for the band's 1994's album Monster and released with its 25th anniversary edition in 2019.[9]
Around the Sun was the first of only two R.E.M. albums to include a title track (the second being its follow-up, Accelerate). The album was also a first for R.E.M. in that it was their first to feature
Bill Rieflin, the band's de facto replacement for former drummer
Bill Berry, who'd retired in 1997. Although Rieflin was never officially inducted into the band as a member, he would serve as a regular auxiliary musician for R.E.M. until the band's dissolution in 2011.[10]
Around the Sun received mixed to negative reviews from critics noted at review aggregator
Metacritic. It has a
weighted average score of 56 out of 100, based on 27 reviews.[7]
Despite hitting #1 in the UK, it became their first studio album to miss the U.S. Top 10 (reaching #13 during seven weeks on the Billboard 200) since 1988's Green, and still awaits a gold record. As of March 2007, Around the Sun had sold 2 million copies worldwide and 232,000 units in the
U.S.[21] This is less than R.E.M. sold in the first week of an album's release while at their early to mid-1990s commercial peak.
After the release of the following Accelerate, guitarist
Peter Buck said Around the Sun "just wasn't really listenable, because it sounds like what it is: a bunch of people that are so bored with the material that they can't stand it anymore."[22] "The songs on Around the Sun are great," remarked singer
Michael Stipe. "But, in the process of recording, we lost our focus as a band."[23] The album's songs were largely excluded from the band's live setlists after the release of Accelerate.
Retrospectives of the band's career cite this album as their nadir. In 2023, Rolling Stone marked this as number 44 on their list of 50 horrible albums by brilliant artists, calling all of their post-Bill Berry studio albums "stellar" except for this one.[24]
Reissue
In 2005, Warner Bros. Records issued an expanded two-disc edition of Around the Sun which includes a CD, a DVD-Audio disc containing a 5.1-channel surround sound mix of the album done by
Elliot Scheiner, and the original CD booklet with expanded liner notes.