Catapulted by their first single, “Vow,” Garbage began its ascent five months before the album was released with a buzzy three song EP on Mushroom Records’ UK imprint Discordant and stateside through Almo Sounds. They quickly became critical darlings with the release of the single. However the two B-side tracks “Subhuman” and “#1 Crush” were not included on the final album.

“I just don’t feel that everyone felt it was strong enough to put on the record. In retrospect it’s a bit silly, because it’s fantastic,” Manson says of “Subhuman.” “You make strange choices and you have to live by them. You can’t see the wood for the trees. By the time you finish the record, you haven’t got a fucking clue. You just have to make due and do you best. Sometimes it’s fatigue, sometimes you’ve been hearing a song for so long you're just over it and you don’t want to put it on the record. Or maybe there’s been a bad experience during the recording of it, or you don’t have as good feelings towards it as you do for another song. People get strangely invested in certain songs and forget about others. It’s just a complicated method of working sometimes.”

“Only Happy When It Rains” followed, acting as the band’s lead single, a song that blended in with the sound of alternative rock of the era, yet poked fun at it at the same time. The look of the video spoke very loudly, as it presented the band in clean cut, big collar suits, with Shirley rocking a cocktail dress — a far cry from flannel shirts and long hair — as they literally destroy the old guard by power-drilling guitars and trampling two-inch tape.

“It was definitely a little tongue-in-cheek and definitely ironic. I think we all felt as a band that alt-rock had gotten incredibly serious. A lot of the bands that were copying the greats were becoming almost pompous in the seriousness in which they approached music making. I think we all felt that it had gotten so dark and so bleak that it was almost funny. So I guess ‘Only Happy When it Rains’ is a bit of a twist on our feelings towards where things were headed,” says Manson.

The song would later be covered by Metallica in 2007 at Neil Young’s Bridge School Benefit.

“I love Metallica and am mildly obsessed with James [Hetfield] and in another world I’m convinced we would have been man and wife,” laughs Shirley. “So it was so flattering to hear him sing that song. It was such an extraordinarily strange choice for him and it was a real honor for us. I love him, he’s delicious!”

The harder edged “Vow” and “Only Happy When It Rains” set the stage, paving the way for the more chilled “Queer,” where the casual fan might have begun to see the chameleon-like properties of the group.

“When I first joined the band there was a really rough sketch of ‘Queer’ that they played for me when I first arrived in Madison. It had Butch singing on it and he had some scratch lyrics with words kind of like ‘pinkest of the pink’ and ‘bluest of the blue’ kind of thing,” recalls Manson. “It was just something that when I took it into the vocal booth, I remember singing it very differently from how the demo had sounded, which was very aggressive. I sort of felt that it would be much more intriguing if it was sung from a gentle, almost sort of trip-hop perspective. Quieting it all down made it much more sinister and gave it a lot more weight.”

If the drums on “Queer” sound familiar, it’s because at least one layer of them are performed by the funky drummer himself, Clyde Stubblefield, whose work with James Brown has been among the most sampled drum breaks of all time. “You don’t use a sample when the genius who played the sample lives down the street from you,” Vig once said.

“[Clyde] lives in Madison and was friends with the band. They were smart enough to pull him in and play on our record. It was a huge honor for everyone involved. He was such a sweetheart and an incredible talent. It was exciting for us to have him there and still feels very special to have him on our record. He’s so modest and brilliant,” says Manson. “I’m sure Butch being a drummer, he is well tuned to certain styles that he is madly in love with.”

The band’s biggest hit would be six months into the album’s release, with their fourth single “Stupid Girl,” released on February 5th, 1996. It’s infectiously smooth sound helped push the album into higher chart territories and the track was nominated for two GRAMMY awards. Yet just as the single was serviced to radio, Garbage were embarking on a tour with the Smashing Pumpkins, which was cut short by the death of travelling keyboard player Jonathan Melvoin, who toured and performed with the Pumpkins. He died of a heroin overdose.

“We were incredibly excited to be on what was essentially our first serious rock & roll tour. It was a big tour and it was exciting. We were all huge fans of the Smashing Pumpkins and we were looking forward to playing Madison Square Garden. And we woke up in the morning and learned that Jonathan had died during the night. It was incredibly shocking and heartbreaking moment for everyone concerned,” reflects Manson. “I just remember us selfishly being brokenhearted that we weren’t going to get to play Madison Square Garden, but we were also kind of freaked out because this was our first brush with sort of reality on the road. When you are on tour, you are in this bubble of joy and adventure and discovery. It was such a crazy ride for us, and then all of a sudden we just got smacked in the face with reality. It was a pretty good lesson for us, because obviously the excesses of it all were so easy to indulge in. I think Jonathan’s death was certainly in the back of my mind from then on out.”

The final single from the album was “Milk,” which would capitalize on the success the band had seen from their preceding trip-hop tinged tracks, commissioning remixes from Massive Attack and Tricky. The history behind Tricky’s remix is both cloudy and convoluted to both fans and the band, despite its greatness.

“We were all huge fans of Tricky and we’d met him a couple of times. He had come to one of our shows in New York and we had talked about working together. We did a duet of ‘Milk’ together, we just thought it would be a cool thing to do, because we all liked each other and each other’s music. By the time ‘Milk’ was released, that was our fifth single, so of course the record company is like ‘We need a new story.’ We had been invited to the MTV Awards in the UK and MTV wanted us to collaborate with someone and we picked Tricky — I think that’s how it went,” says Manson, scarcely recalling the details. “Anyway, we recorded a duet together in New York. He had a very different approach to recording, which makes for incredible records, but I think totally freaked the band out, because he just worked in a totally different way than we were used to working. It wasn’t perhaps as successful as we would have liked it to be, so in the end we just had him remix the track. I think the original idea was that we do the duet together, and in retrospect it sounds phenomenal, but at the time it was contrary to how we worked, so it threw us off a little. But I love him dearly and think he’s a phenomenal talent.”

Each of the singles were treated with the utmost care. In an era when physical goods ruled, the band took the release of the singles very seriously, commissioning high end art direction and unique packaging for each one, such as metal or rubber encasement. All emblazoned with the iconic “G” logo, the releases were blessed with exclusive, previously unreleased b-side tracks and remixes. They were treated with value and it said to the consumer, “what’s underneath this packaging is as beautiful as its exterior.”