垃圾合唱团

Garbage is an American rock band formed in 1993 in Madison, Wisconsin. The band's line-up, consisting of Scottish musician Shirley Manson (vocals) and American musicians Duke Erikson (guitar, bass, keyboards), Steve Marker (guitar, keyboards), and Butch Vig (drums, percussion), has remained unchanged since its inception. All four members are involved in songwriting and production. Garbage has sold over 17 million albums worldwide.

The band's 1995 eponymous debut album was critically acclaimed, selling over four million copies and achieving double platinum certification in the UK, the US, and Australia. It was accompanied by a string of increasingly successful singles, including "Stupid Girl" and "Only Happy When It Rains". Follow-up Version 2.0 (1998) was equally successful, topping the UK Albums Chart and receiving two Grammy Award nominations. The band followed this by performing and co-producing the theme song to the 19th James Bond film The World Is Not Enough (1999). Their third album Beautiful Garbage (2001) was also critically praised, but failed to match the commercial success of its predecessors, despite selling over a million copies in its first three months.

Garbage quietly disbanded amidst the troubled production of their fourth album Bleed Like Me (2005), but regrouped to complete the album, which peaked at a career-high number four in the US. The band cut short their Bleed Like Me concert tour and announced an indefinite hiatus to pursue separate interests. It was briefly interrupted in 2007, when they recorded new tracks for their greatest hits album Absolute Garbage. The band reunited in 2011, and self-released their fifth album, Not Your Kind of People (2012), on their own label Stunvolume to positive reviews. They followed it with Strange Little Birds (2016) and No Gods No Masters (2021). The band's eighth studio album, Let All That We Imagine Be the Light, was released on May 30, 2025.

History

Formation (1993–1994)

Duke Erikson and Butch Vig had been in several bands together, including Spooner and Fire Town (with Steve Marker as a sound engineer). In 1983, Vig and Marker founded Smart Studios in Madison and Vig's production work brought him to the attention of Sub Pop. Spooner reunited in 1990 and released another record, but disbanded in 1993 as Vig and Marker's career as producers took over. In 1994, as Vig had become "kind of burned out on doing really long records". He collaborated with Erikson and Marker by doing remixes for acts such as U2, Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails, and House of Pain. The remixes featured different instrumentation, and often highlighting new guitar hooks and bass grooves. This experience inspired the three men to form a band, where they "wanted to take that remix sensibility and somehow translate it into all of the possibilities of a band setup."

According to Vig, the team drew inspiration for its name from a hostile early comment, when a friend of the band heard recording material said, "This shit sounds like garbage!" However, according to This Is the Noise That Keeps Me Awake, an autobiography of the band, Vig wrote in his 1993 studio journal about the creative process; of working for long periods of time, "without coming up with anything cool... and when you least expect it, it all falls into place." The name derives from the last line of this entry: "I hope that all this garbage will become something beautiful!".