Listen to the new Garbage track 'Blood for Poppies'
Garbage - Blood for Poppies
The new album from Garbage "Not Your Kind of People" will be out in mid-May. The band just released the first single "Blood for Poppies" from their web site for download. The song covers all the bases; loud fuzzy guitars, a tropical/reggae chorus and a killer hook that probably won't endear them to the Pitchfork crowd.
A video for the song has been completed and should be out soon. It has been seven years since Garbage put out a record and the music landscape has changed considerably since 2005. Once the darlings of alternative rock radio, behind producer/drummer Butch Vig's impeccable credentials, it should be interesting to see how the indie music blogs of the world treat them.
Several of the shows on the just-announced Garbage world tour have sold out. The band is shunning the major label trappings of their earlier success on Geffen records and have chosen to release the new album on their own independent label Stunvolume.
Butch Vig told Billboard Magazine about the decision to go independent:
"We're out of all our corporate responsibilities from the past, and initially we thought that was terrifying but now we think it's liberating. We're going to put the record out on our own label and just figure out how to license it and market it because we want it under our control."
Recorded at Atwater Village in Los Angeles, the album is the group's first not to be recorded in Madison, Wisconsin, the city where Garbage first formed in 1994.
Earlier albums by Garbage were all recorded at the infamous Smart Studios in Madison. Smart closed its doors in 2010, a victim of low-cost DIY home recording equipment, the popularity of Pro Tools and the decline of the traditional music industry. Only one member of the band, Doug Erikson, still calls Madison home. Butch Vig lives in Los Angeles.
The absence of Midwest dates on the upcoming Garbage tour hints at a Chicago Lollalapooza slot in August. Lollapalooza prohibits all its acts from performing within 300 miles of the city for six months before the fest and three months after. Madison is in that exclusion zone.
We'll just have to wait and see if that comes to fruition.