“Only Happy When It Rains” by Garbage

"Only Happy When It Rains" is Garbage winking at everyone who took the '90s too seriously. The song comes from the band's self-titled 1995 debut, written and produced by all four members, Shirley Manson, Butch Vig, Duke Erikson and Steve Marker, and recorded at their own Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin.

Manson plays the gloom-rock pose for laughs, sending up the mopey angst that filled alternative radio at the time, while the band pours on a gleaming wall of fuzz guitars and a chorus sweet enough to be a pop song. Guests Mike Kashou on bass and Pauli Ryan on percussion help fill out the sound. It's the joke and the thrill at the same time, and that's what made it land.

It was the band's breakthrough in Britain, where the press liked it and Radio One backed it hard. In the US, Samuel Bayer's video made MTV's Buzz Bin, the song crossed over to Top 40 radio and charted strongly on the Hot 100 in early 1996, and it lifted the album into the top half of the Billboard 200. Metallica have covered it, and it later turned up on The X-Files and the Captain Marvel soundtrack.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.