“I’d pull out parts, like 30 seconds here, 8 bars here, a riff someone played or lyric… wherever I thought there was a good focal point,” Vig says. Upon their return, the band began the long process of crafting the extended jams into songs. “Within two weeks, we had written between 35 and 40 pieces of music,” he says, “ many were up to 15 minutes long.” But this time all four of us went in with a completely blank slate, and I was thinking, ‘what if there’s nothing? What if we don’t come up with anything?’”īut the opposite would prove true. Usually, I come up with some sketches at my home studio first, could be a chord progression, a drum beat, even just a title.
“We went there with nothing, with no songs, no templates, nothing,” recalls Vig. Taking up residence at guitarist Steve Marker’s family home, they started, a word that “terrifies” the producer in Vig, “jamming.” To find out where it all began, Vig takes us back to mid-2019 when the band headed to the idyllic paradise of Palm Springs, California to work on their first new material since 2016’s Strange Little Birds. Shirley Manson’s incisive lyrics are matched in intensity by a rich sonic palette of serrated synths and jagged guitars that push the boundaries of traditional rock further than they ever have before, while still sounding altogether – Garbage.
It’s no surprise that the songs sound, as Butch Vig so eloquently puts it, “pissed off.”Īnd it’s not just the album’s themes that make No Gods No Masters a brazen entry in Garbage’s catalogue. Thematically interrogating drivers of civil unrest, No Gods No Masters gives an unapologetic account of modern times. One listen to Garbage’s new emotionally charged LP, invokes the frenetic spirit of this era in spades. Having helmed the production on a stack of seminal early 90s records, including the Smashing Pumpkins’ 1991 debut Gish (1991) and Siamese Dream in 1993, Sonic Youth’s 1992 classic Dirty and, of course, Nirvana’s 1991 global breakthrough Nevermind (among MANY others), Vig could be described as an architect of alt-rock an architect of angst even. We were lucky enough to catch up with the band’s legendary drummer and producer, Butch Vig who called in from his home studio in Los Angeles to chat to us about the new album. Earlier this month, alt-rock pioneers Garbage released their long-awaited seventh album, No Gods No Masters a resounding socio-political soundscape that reflects modern times with a scope that exemplifies the collective experience, in life and music created it.
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