After touring for two and a half years to promote their breakthrough third studio album, Tragic Kingdom (1995), No Doubt wrote several dozen songs for its follow-up and eventually settled on working with producer Glen Ballard.

[1] Having toured extensively for two and a half years since the release of Tragic Kingdom, they initially had trouble producing material and decided to experiment with new sounds.

[3] During early production in mid-1998 the band worked on seven tracks in Los Angeles with Matthew Wilder, who had produced Tragic Kingdom, but had creative differences with him.

[8] They frequently missed due dates, arguing that hurrying the album to cash in on the success of Tragic Kingdom was unwise since three years had passed.

The band was split when singer Gwen Stefani offered to do so but drummer Adrian Young and guitarist Tom Dumont did not want to, hesitant to trust Interscope after it had sublicensed Tragic Kingdom to Trauma Records.

[8] The music of Return of Saturn further explores new wave style,[13] while adding an alternative rock feel and maintaining some of the band's ska and reggae sounds.

Adrian Young's drum part on "Simple Kind of Life" was mixed through low fidelity filters to give it the sound of a lo-fi power ballad.

"Ex-Girlfriend", which originally featured a Prince-style funk sound, was rewritten and includes rapped vocals over piano and flamenco guitar parts.

After opening with Gabrial McNair's jazz funeral horn part over Young's beatboxing, "Bathwater" proceeds into a song written in swing time.

Young and bassist Tony Kanal's contributions were compared to the rhythm of nu metal music, and the fragmented progression of "Comforting Lie" was likened to the work of Korn.

[18] Entertainment Weekly's David Browne characterized the album as filled with "smoother, layered mid-tempo ballads as creamily textured as extra-thick napoleon pastries", but stated that Stefani's lyrics were too much of a throwback to the alternative rock scene of the early 1990s and contrasted with the boom of teen pop.

[16] AllMusic critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine, however, called it "a terrific, layered record that exceeds any expectations set by Tragic Kingdom".

[32][33] Return of Saturn was awarded a Platinum certification by the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) in June 2000, denoting sales in excess of 100,000 copies.