Garbage "Garbage"

Garbage is the debut studio album by American rock band Garbage. It was released on August 15, 1995, by Almo Sounds. The album was met with critical acclaim upon its release, being viewed by some as an innovative recording for its time. It reached number 20 on the US Billboard 200 and number six on the UK Albums Chart, while charting inside the top 20 and receiving multi-platinum certifications in several territories. The album's success was helped by the band promoting it on a year-long tour, including playing on the European festival circuit and supporting the Smashing Pumpkins throughout 1996, as well as by a run of increasingly successful singles culminating with "Stupid Girl", which received Grammy Award nominations for Best Rock Song and Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group in 1997.

In October 2015, the album was reissued to mark its 20th anniversary, featuring remastered tracks from the original analog tapes, as well as remixes and previously unreleased alternate versions of songs from the album.

In 1983, Butch Vig and Steve Marker founded Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin, and Vig's production work brought him to the attention of Sub Pop. Vig's old band Spooner reunited in 1990 and released another record, but disbanded in 1993 as Vig's and Marker's careers as producers gained strength. In 1994, as Vig became "kind of burned out on doing really long records", he got together with Duke Erikson and Marker, and they started producing remixes for acts such as U2, Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails and House of Pain, featuring different instrumentation and often highlighting new guitar hooks and bass grooves. The experience inspired the three men to form a band, in which they "wanted to take that remix sensibility and somehow translate it into all of the possibilities of a band setup." An early comment that their work sounded "like garbage" inspired the band's name.

Shirley Manson had been performing with the Edinburgh-based rock band Goodbye Mr Mackenzie since 1984. In 1993, several of the members, including Manson, formed the side project Angelfish. Their only studio album, Angelfish, was as commercially unsuccessful as preceding albums by Goodbye Mr Mackenzie, selling only 10,000 copies.

Initial sessions with Vig on vocals and the members' past work with all-male groups led to the band's desire for a woman on lead. Marker was watching 120 Minutes when he saw the one-time airing of the music video for Angelfish's "Suffocate Me". He showed the video to Erikson and Vig while their manager, Shannon O'Shea, tracked Manson down. When Manson was contacted, she didn't know who Vig was and was urged to check the credits on Nirvana's album Nevermind, which Vig had produced. On April 8, 1994, Manson met Erikson, Marker and Vig for the first time in London. Later that evening Vig was informed of Kurt Cobain's suicide. Garbage was put on hold as Angelfish was touring North America in support of Live. Erikson, Marker and Vig attended the Metro Chicago date, and Manson was invited to Madison to audition for the band. The audition did not go well, but Manson socialized with the men while there and they found they had a similar taste in music. Angelfish disbanded at the end of the Live tour. Manson called O'Shea and asked to audition again, feeling that "it would work out".

In her return to Smart Studios, Manson began to work on skeletal versions of the songs "Queer", "Vow" and "Stupid Girl". While looking for a record deal for the album, Garbage sent out demo tapes with no bio, to avoid a bidding war over Vig's production history. Garbage signed with Mushroom Records UK worldwide and to Jerry Moss's label Almo Sounds for North America. Manson's contribution was licensed to both Mushroom and Almo by her label Radioactive Records.

"We ended up having 48 tracks of samples and loops, and all sorts of strange processed sound effects and weird guitar overdubs, and then through the mix process we'd add and subtract until we'd get to a point where the song still came across."

 — Butch Vig on the creative process

Garbage continued to work on the album throughout the start of 1995, delayed by Vig's work producing Soul Asylum's Let Your Dim Light Shine album and the songs being "piecemealed together in the studio". Vig described the composing process as a "dysfunctional democracy" where someone would bring a loop or a sample, which was followed by jam sessions in which the band members would "find one bar that's kind of cool, load that into our samplers, jam on top of that, [and] Shirley will ad-lib", with the process continuing until the song was finished, often with "all of the original ideas gone, and the song had somehow mutated into something completely different." Among the songs that were completely reworked, "As Heaven Is Wide" went from "a big rock track" to a techno-style song with Tom Jones-inspired beats, only keeping Erikson's fuzz bass and Manson's vocals from the original recording. Given Vig "got bored spending so many years recording really fast, straightforward punk records", the band "didn't want to approach the Garbage record from the angle of a band playing live", making their songs out of samples that would be processed and reworked in a Wall of Sound process "to create something that sounded fresh."

A major part of the work involved Manson rewriting the song lyrics, which Vig said the band attempted to "write from a woman's perspective and I think, initially, some of them were a little pretentious. But as soon as Shirley came on board she simplified the lyrics so that they were a lot more subtle and worked better as songs." Manson detailed that regarding the previous song sketches, "some of the ideas for lyrics I found unsuitable, and others I liked and worked on with them. I always went to bat for what I believed in." She added that because "the lyrics take a while to work on" bandmates would give suggestions and she included the ones that fancied her.

Garbage debuted at number 29 on the Top Heatseekers chart dated September 2, 1995, before peaking at number two on March 9, 1996. In the issue dated September 30, 1995, the album entered the Billboard 200 at number 193, and reached its peak position of number 20 on August 10, 1996. The album was certified double platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on February 24, 1999, and by August 2008, it had sold 2.4 million copies in the United States. In Canada, the album reached number 15 on The Record's chart and number 25 on RPM's chart, was certified double platinum by Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA), denoting shipments in excess of 200,000 units.

Garbage debuted at number 12 on the UK Albums Chart in October 1995 with 9,409 copies sold in its first week, eventually peaking at number six in April 1996. The album was certified double platinum by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) on October 16, 1998, and had sold 701,757 copies in the United Kingdom as of May 2012. The album saw modest success across continental Europe, reaching number 16 in France, number 19 in Sweden, number 23 in Finland, number 30 in Norway and number 55 in Germany. In Oceania, it charted at number four in Australia and number one in New Zealand, earning double platinum certifications in both countries. As of August 2015, Garbage had sold over four million copies worldwide.

Track listing

All tracks are written by Garbage, except where noted.

1. "Supervixen" 3:55
2. "Queer" 4:36
3. "Only Happy When It Rains" 3:56
4. "As Heaven Is Wide" 4:44
5. "Not My Idea" 3:41
6. "A Stroke of Luck" 4:44
7. "Vow" 4:30
8. "Stupid Girl" (Garbage, Joe Strummer, Mick Jones) 4:18
9. "Dog New Tricks" 3:56
10. "My Lover's Box" 3:55
11. "Fix Me Now" 4:43
12. "Milk" 3:53

Total length: 50:51

When Garbage began to collate the material for career retrospective Absolute Garbage in 2007, the Garbage analog masters could not be found. Vig and audio engineer Billy Bush were able to track down an archived, but rather incomplete and damaged, set of 16-bit 44.1 kHz safety DAT mixes. Despite the condition of the backups, mastering engineer Emily Lazar at The Lodge in New York City was able to reverse-engineer the missing songs from the damaged archive. Lazar used some alternate versions of the songs when completing the final master. Her assistant, Joe LaPorta, mastered and edited the remixes for the special edition.

Garbage – production, recording

Howie Weinberg – mastering

Scott Hull – editing, post-production

Mike Zirkel – second engineer