Garbage Album Features Two Guest Bassists

Garbage: Strange Little BirdsGarbage has released its sixth studio album, Strange Little Birds, the group’s first since 2012’s Not Your Kind of People.

The band, which released its eponymous debut in 1995, has retained its original personnel throughout the years: Duke Erikson, Butch Vig, Steve Marker and vocalist Shirley Manson. All the members play a variety of instruments and produce. Vig, perhaps most well-known for producing Nirvana’s Nevermind, tells Playboy that a couple of non-band members handled bass on the record: Garbage’s touring bass player Eric Avery (Jane’s Addiction) played on six songs, “and Justin Meldal-Johnsen (Beck, NIN) played bass on two songs.” Both Avery and Meldal-Johnsen also played on Not Your Kind of People. And, Meldal-Johnsen appeared on the 2005 Garbage album Bleed Like Me.

The band began developing the record with loose jams, Vig tells MusicFeeds: “Shirley had talked about trying to keep the writing process and the recording more spontaneous and sort of getting back to the mindset that we had on our first record – which was very experimental. So we tried a lot of different things. We switched things up – I’d play bass or guitar and Duke would play drums, or we would all play keyboards on songs – there were no guitars or bass or drums.”

The ultimate result is an album that Manson calls more ambiguous and cinematic than previous Garbage records, according to Manson in Rolling Stone.

Listen to “Even Though Our Love Is Doomed” and see what you think:

Strange Little Birds is available on CD, vinyl and as a digital download (iTunes and Amazon MP3).

Strange Little Birds Track List:

  1. Sometimes
  2. Empty
  3. Blackout
  4. If I lost You
  5. Night Drive Loneliness
  6. Even Though Our Love is Doomed
  7. Magnetized
  8. We Never Tell
  9. So We Can Stay Alive
  10. Teaching Little Fingers To Play
  11. Amends

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