The group was the subject of the 2004 documentary film called Dig!, and have gained media notoriety for their tumultuous working relationships as well as the erratic behavior of Newcombe.

The band name is a portmanteau of deceased Rolling Stones founder and guitarist Brian Jones – a key figure in introducing Eastern influences into Western rock in the late Sixties – and the 1978 incident at cult leader Jim Jones' self-dubbed "Jonestown" settlement in Guyana where over 900 of his followers died in a mass murder-suicide known as the Jonestown Massacre.

Their first albums were compilations of recording sessions and an early demo tape, titled Pol Pot's Pleasure Penthouse.

The band's follow-up album, Methodrone, was developed largely out of the concepts explored on Spacegirl and heavily influenced by the shoegaze genre that had gained prominence several years prior to its release.

Over the next couple of years, the band shifted its sound from their more shoegaze, goth, and dream pop influences of the '80s and '90s into a '60s retro-futurist aesthetic.

[11] The album includes the song "Straight Up and Down," which was later used as theme music for the HBO television drama series Boardwalk Empire (2010–14), and was engineered by Larry Thrasher of the influential group Psychic TV.

[14] At the end of the album Newcombe included an entire EP called Sound of Confusion, compiled largely from earlier BJM recordings.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre recorded their sixth album, Give It Back!, in 1997 after relocating to Los Angeles from San Francisco.

[14] This led to the release of the band's seventh full-length album, Strung Out in Heaven, in 1998, as well as their first-ever tours of the UK and Japan.

In 2001, the band released their eighth studio album, Bravery Repetition and Noise, which included the track "Sailor", a re-work of a song originally performed by The Cryan' Shames.

[citation needed] In 2005, the band released the EP We Are the Radio on Newcombe's own label, The committee to Keep Music Evil, which features a close collaboration with independent singer-songwriter Sarabeth Tucek.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre released their tenth studio album, My Bloody Underground, in 2008 on Cargo Records.

Newcombe stated that the album's title relates to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's use of the term, whereby something is destroyed in order to preserve it.

[20] In March 2022, the band announced that two albums, Fire Doesn't Grow on Trees and The Future Is Your Past, were scheduled to be released in June and October 2022 respectively.

[27]In February 2024, Joel Gion published In the Jingle Jangle Jungle, a memoir recounting the first ten years of the band.

[29] Along with Portland, Oregon alternative rock band The Dandy Warhols, The Brian Jonestown Massacre were the subjects of the 2004 documentary film Dig!.

The film was recorded over the course of seven years by filmmaker Ondi Timoner, but largely focused on The Brian Jonestown Massacre from late 1996 to mid-1998.