Fungus Amongus is the debut studio album by American rock band Incubus, released November 1, 1995, on Stopuglynailfungus Music on Chillum, Incubus' own independent label. It was later re-released under Epic/Immortal on November 7, 2000, after popular demand.
Incubus formed in 1991, while its members were still in high school, and recorded several demos over the next few years. In 2017, drummer José Pasillas described Fungus Amongus as "our first concerted effort at putting a group of songs together on an LP". However, guitarist Mike Einziger has said that he views it as a compilation of demos they had recorded while in high school, rather than as a cohesive studio album. He stated in 2017, "making recordings back then was really challenging, especially for a bunch of high school kids. We didn't have access to anything. We didn't have money to make recordings. We didn't have a studio. We didn't have any equipment. We didn't know how to use the equipment. But we slowly began to meet certain people. We ended up working with a producer who owned a recording studio." Einziger also claimed in 2011 that the writing process was different to later records, since the band hadn't done any touring yet at that time. He said, "it's definitely different when you're in kind of a closed environment and writing music for your friends, which is what I think we were doing in our pre-S.C.I.E.N.C.E. days." Incubus had trouble attracting the interest of major labels during their early years, which led to them releasing Fungus Amongus independently in 1995. The band printed 1,000 copies and sold all of them. Vocalist Brandon Boyd remembered in 2020, "It was a win for us, but let me tell you like selling 1,000 copies was hard. When we did get to work with a major label, it was definitely exciting."
The album cover image is of a fly agaric mushroom. Many of the names given under "Personnel" are actually pseudonyms for the band members. "Fabio" is Mike Einziger; "Dirk Lance" is bassist Alex Katunich, who later adopted the moniker as his stage name; "Brandy Flower" is an actual Sony employee; and "Happy Knappy" is Brandon Boyd. "Bett" and "Brett Spivery" refer to Brett Spivey, longtime friend of the band, who went on to make their first two DVDs and the videos for "I Miss You" and "Summer Romance (Anti-Gravity Love Song)".
"Hilikus", "Shaft!", "Take Me to Your Leader", and "You Will Be a Hot Dancer" were all re-recorded for the 1997 Enjoy Incubus EP, which was the band's first release after signing to Epic/Immortal Records in 1996. The EP also included additional material, such as a new song called "Version". The re-recordings of the Fungus Amongus tracks featured added DJ scratches by DJ Lyfe, who joined Incubus in late 1995, after Fungus Amongus had been released. The re-recording of "Hilikus" had a new, untitled hidden track, which plays after several minutes of silence. On this release, some of the band members were given new pseudonyms; Einziger's was "Dynamike", Boyd's was "Brandon of the Jungle", and DJ Lyfe's was "Kid Lyfe". On S.C.I.E.N.C.E. the band continued to create new pseudonyms, before abandoning this concept on later releases.
The band has not performed any songs from Fungus Amongus or Enjoy Incubus since 2004. That year, they performed "Take Me to Your Leader" nine times on their A Crow Left of the Murder... tour, having then not played it since 1998. Their last performances of any of the other Fungus Amongus songs were in 2000. The intro to "Trouble in 421" was briefly played at a July 2011 show in Los Angeles, which was recorded as part of their Incubus HQ Live release. While Incubus still regularly performs certain songs from S.C.I.E.N.C.E., Boyd asserted in 2012 that the band has no intention of performing tracks from Fungus Amongus again. He remarked, "what's funny is people are still asking for a lot of those songs. We're very happy that they exist, but we just as soon let them exist in recordings. I don't even know if we'd know how to play them."
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