With Celebrity Skin, Hole traded the raw sound of Live Through This for glossy, melodic rock full of California imagery. The band's third studio album was recorded over nine months in Los Angeles, New York and London, with Michael Beinhorn producing. Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins joined the sessions for twelve days and shares the musical credits on five of the twelve songs; Courtney Love wrote all the lyrics and took the title from a poem of her own, inspired by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. At Beinhorn's suggestion, session drummer Deen Castronovo recorded the drums. James Hunter of Rolling Stone heard an album lyrically obsessed with "the promises and the agonies of Southern California". The title track, Malibu and Awful became its best-known songs. Peaking at number nine on the Billboard 200, it became Hole's biggest commercial success in 1998.

This edition is an LP on purple vinyl.