Butch Vig doesn’t need to prove anything. If he wanted to spend his days cashing Nevermind checks and taste-testing vintage snare samples, no one would fault him. Instead, he’s releasing sprawling psychedelic folk-rock albums with 5 Billion in Diamonds, co-producing what sounds like Garbage’s darkest album yet, and making his own virtual drum machine.
“It’s pretty free,” Vig says of his work with 5BID, the cinematic supergroup-slash-sample-happy psych collective he leads alongside UK producers James Grillo and Andy Jenks. “We just start with a template and see where it goes. And it always goes somewhere completely different than I expect. In a good way.”
Their second LP, Divine Accidents, named after an Orson Welles quote, is built on the kind of happy mistakes that happen when you hand off lush, analog soundbeds to a revolving door of guest vocalists—including members of Ocean Blue and The Soundtrack of Our Lives—and see what outer space they drift into. “We wanted to come up with these sonic landscapes and let the singers do their thing,” Vig says. “That was kind of the original Garbage idea too, before Shirley joined.”
Unlike Garbage, where Shirley Manson’s lyrical scalpel guides the chaos, 5BID works like a ghost story séance with vintage keyboards and obscure late-60s B-sides as the medium. The vibe is “psychedelic folk rock,” Vig says, “with a cosmic thread.” If that sounds pretentious, it’s not. Vig has receipts. “James has a 20,000-album collection. I’m not exaggerating.”
Despite the scattered vocal contributors, Divine Accidents holds together surprisingly well. There’s a running theme of space, time, and maybe just a little dread. “The world is such a crazy place right now,” Vig says. “Sometimes you’ve got to look to the cosmos just to make sense of it.”
The standout is “The Unknown,” an ambient elegy so sparse it almost went out as an instrumental—until singer Martin Barnard wandered into the studio and quietly blew everyone’s mind. “His vocal brings me to tears,” Vig says. “It’s so vulnerable. I still don’t know where that song came from, but I’m glad it did.”
The cinematic DNA is obvious—and not just because Vig can name-drop John Barry without blinking. Garbage did a Bond theme (The World Is Not Enough), after all. “That riff Duke played had a John Barry vibe,” he recalls. “But we still wanted it to sound like Garbage. So there’s all that gritty drum stuff we do.”
Speaking of drums, Butch Vig now has his own plug-in. Native Instruments just dropped Butch Vig Drums, a sample library of loops, hits, and beat templates built from 18 months of what Vig calls “endless tweaking.” “I wanted something with a rock edge,” he says. “A lot of sample libraries are either hip-hop or EDM. I wanted garbage drums. Lowercase g, uppercase Garbage.”
As for Garbage the band? They’re almost done with a new album, working title The Palm Springs Sessions, and it sounds like the chill desert vibes didn’t last long. “It started out spare and beautiful,” Vig says. “Now it’s dark and schizophrenic. But it still sounds like Garbage. We can’t help ourselves.”
Asked if the new stuff echoes their apocalyptic 2017 single “No Horses,” Vig doesn’t hesitate. “A couple songs definitely live in that world—kind of stream-of-consciousness, Patti Smith-style. Shirley had a sixth sense, maybe. Some of the new songs are just... crazy sounding.”
Crazy is relative, of course, when you’ve also produced Sonic Youth’s Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star—a record so barebones it makes Bleach sound lush. “That was all about simplicity,” Vig says. “Dirty was layered. This was, like, two guitars, bass, drums. Done. Also one of the funniest records I’ve ever made. I don’t remember laughing that much in the studio.”
But don’t mistake Divine Accidents for a nostalgia trip. It's not retro for the sake of it. It’s more like pop archaeology—digging through the weirdest corners of obscure cinema scores and letting them mutate into something new. “Music is escapism,” Vig says. “It takes you somewhere else. Somewhere above all this.”
And if that “somewhere else” sounds like Frank Sinatra beaming down from a vintage synth over a lost spaghetti western melody... so be it.
Watch or listen to the interview above and then check out the video below.
