Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.
Few bands have married the harsh clang of industrial rock to sugary pop hooks quite as deftly as Garbage. So it feels appropriate that a little of one of the band’s best albums was recorded in a dilapidated building that had been a candy factory. In a piece about the making of 1998’s Version 2.0 for the August 1999 issue of Keyboard magazine, drummer Butch Vig and guitarist Steve Marker revealed that they’d set up a drum kit in the vacant building in Madison, Wisconsin, to get percussion sounds with the space’s unique acoustics. Local police cut the recording session short after neighbors complained, but Garbage were still able to use some of those drum sounds on three songs on the album, including the standout “Hammering In My Head.”
The song features one of Garbage frontwoman Shirley Manson’s most memorable vocal performances. The visceral imagery in her extended spoken outro might even contain an allusion to the track’s candy factory backstory: “Sweat it all out in our electric storms and our shifting sands / our candy jars and our sticky hands.” A remix by Eli Janney of Girls Against Boys was never officially released, but that track, “Hammering In My Head (Americruiser Remix)” eventually leaked on the internet.
Last year Garbage played “Hammering in My Head” live for the first time since 2018. And it’s remained a staple of the Happy Endings tour that wrapped up in November, which the band has said will likely be their final headlining North American tour.
Three more essential Garbage deep cuts:
“Supervixen”
My brother bought Garbage’s self-titled debut in the summer of 1995. And I can still vividly remember that I thought the CD skipped when the first track abruptly went silent about four seconds into “Supervixen,” one of my favorite album openers of all time.
“Bad Boyfriend”
Butch Vig and Dave Grohl were both propelled to fame by their work on Nirvana’s 1991 album Nevermind. And they first reunited a decade later when Grohl played drums on the opening track to Garbage’s 2004 album Bleed Like Me, followed by Vig producing the 2011 Foo Fighters album Wasting Light.
“Chinese Fire Horse”
One of the standouts from Garbage’s eighth album Let All That We Imagine Be the Light, released in May, is Manson’s defiant shot back at sexist and ageist detractors: “You think I’m too ambitious / You’re so dumb it makes me cry.”
