Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop is the third studio album by the American rock band Stone Temple Pilots, released on March 26, 1996, through Atlantic Records.
The album debuted at number four on the Billboard 200 and all three of its singles—"Big Bang Baby", "Trippin' on a Hole in a Paper Heart", and "Lady Picture Show"—reached the top of the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart.
In early 1995, shortly after the band was forced to scrap two weeks' worth of recorded material, lead singer Scott Weiland was arrested for heroin and cocaine possession and sentenced to one year's probation.
In the months following this incident, Weiland formed his own side-band, the Magnificent Bastards, and recorded songs for the Tank Girl soundtrack and for a John Lennon tribute album.
Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic stated in his review of the album that "Tiny Music illustrates that the band aren't content with resting on their laurels" and "STP have added a new array of sounds that lend depth to their immediately accessible hooks," naming shoegaze and jangle pop as two examples of genres explored on the album.
[10] Said John Eder, "The little altar in the background was a last minute addition Scott wanted to put in, and it actually existed in his house, where I went to shoot it."
"[12] Band photographer John Eder recounts of the mixed reception, "I remember [Tiny Music] getting totally trashed critically, for example in Entertainment Weekly, with the critic even singling out and making fun of the bands' physical appearances – like, their actual body types – in the little snapshot fold-out thing that came in the CD."
Following Weiland's death, Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins posited, "It was STP's 3rd album that had got me hooked, a wizardly mix of glam and post-punk, and I confessed to Scott, as well as the band many times, how wrong I'd been in assessing their native brilliance.
"[19] In 2021, Pitchfork published a positive review of the 25th anniversary reissue of Tiny Music, with the writer Sadie Sartini Garner observing that it is "primarily an album of expansion" and acknowledged their original 1996 review (in which the writer Ryan Schreiber wished that Weiland would "tie [himself] off and fall directly into space forever")[20] as "genuinely deplorable."