The album was produced by Matthew Wilder and recorded in 11 studios in the Greater Los Angeles area between March 1993 and October 1995.

An early 1997 performance at the Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim was filmed and released as Live in the Tragic Kingdom on VHS and later DVD.

The album's pop-oriented sound contrasted with grunge music, which was popular in the United States when No Doubt was released.

Keyboardist Eric Stefani eventually stopped recording with the band because he disliked having to relinquish creative control.

[9] The album is named after the nickname guitarist Tom Dumont's seventh-grade teacher had for Disneyland, which is in Anaheim, California, where the band members grew up.

Those from No Doubt and The Beacon Street Collection were written mainly by Eric Stefani, who left the band after Tragic Kingdom was finished.

[24]The first single released from Tragic Kingdom was "Just a Girl", which details Gwen Stefani's exasperation with female stereotypes and her father's concerned reaction to her driving home late from her boyfriend's house.

[26] The second single was "Spiderwebs", written about an uninterested woman who is trying to avoid the constant phone calls of a persistent man.

[31] Composing the song began when Kanal was having a fight with Stefani, then his girlfriend, through the bathroom door of his parents' house in Yorba Linda, California.

To promote the album, Trauma launched a street campaign that targeted high school students and the skateboarding community.

Palmer attributed the jump to a Channel One News program that Stefani hosted in January 1996, which was broadcast in 12,000 classrooms, and the band's subsequent performance at a Blockbuster store in Fresno, California.

[37] In May 1996, the band worked with HMV, MuchMusic, and the Universal Music Group to put on a global in-store promotion.

The session was broadcast live to HMV stores worldwide and on a webcast so that fans could watch and ask the band questions through MuchMusic's VJs.

Lighting design was difficult because there were only four rehearsals, so the show was arranged to be flexible to allow for what Lafortune referred to as "a very kinetic performance".

[40] An early 1997 performance at the Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim was filmed[41] and was released as Live in the Tragic Kingdom on VHS on November 11, 1997.

David Fricke of Rolling Stone was mostly enthused by the album, describing it as "ear candy with good beats, not just bludgeon-by-numbers guitars" and its music as "a spry, white-suburban take on ska and Blondieesque pop".

[22] Entertainment Weekly's David Browne was more critical, attributing the album's sales to Stefani's "leggy, bleached-blond calling card" and concluding that "sex still sells".

Browne described the music as "a hefty chunk of new-wave party bounce and Chili Peppers-style white-boy funk, with dashes of reggae, squealing hair-metal guitar, disco, ska-band horns" and the band as sounding like "savvy, lounge-bred pros".

Individual songs were singled out and commented on: "Just a Girl" was described as "a chirpy, ska-tinged bopper", "Don't Speak" as "an old-fangled power ballad", "Sixteen" as a "song of solidarity with misunderstood teenage girls", and "Spiderwebs" and "End It on This" as "[Stefani] acknowledg[ing] obsessions with losers and tr[ying] to break free.

"[23] Calling the album a marked improvement over "the diffuse, rambling songwriting of [No Doubt's] two previous CDs", Mike Boehm of the Los Angeles Times said that on Tragic Kingdom, "The band is bright, hard-hitting and kinetic, as sharp production captures the core, four-man instrumental team and adjunct horn section at their best".

[46] In a favorable review for The Village Voice, critic Chuck Eddy felt that although "[the album] turns pretentious ... No Doubt resurrects the exuberance new-wave guys lost when '80s indie labels and college radio conned them into settling for slam-pit fits and wallflower wallpaper".

[21] His Village Voice colleague Robert Christgau was less impressed, calling Stefani "hebephrenic" and the album "hyped up" and not "as songful as its fun-besotted partisans [claim]".

[51] In a retrospective review, AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine called it "pure fun" and described the music as something "between '90s punk, third-wave ska, and pop sensibility" and a mix of "new wave melodicism, post-grunge rock, and West Coast sunshine", noting the songs "Spiderwebs", "Just a Girl", and "Don't Speak" as having "positively ruled the airwaves".

Save Ferris's guitarist and vocalist Brian Mashburn stated that No Doubt helped allow bands like his receive attention from the mainstream.